MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

As he said this he found he was sweating, and even crying. Another thing he didn't understand was why he had to correct the spelling. I mean, why bother? Who cared? No one was ever going to read this stuff, except the author, and the author's mum.

"I'm amazed he spelt the tide right."

"What is the title?" asked Balfour.

"Another Gift from Genius. By Alexander P. O'Boye. That's assuming he spelt his name right. What was his first one called?"

"One moment." Balfour tapped his keys. "A Gift from Genius," he said.

"Jesus. How old is he?" "Guess," said Balfour. "Nine," said Richard. "Actually he's in his late sixties."

"Pitiful, isn't it? What's the matter with him? I mean is he insane? "Many of our authors are retired. This is one of the services we perform. They have to have something to do."

Or something to be, thought Richard. Sitting in the pub all day with a dog on your lap would be more creative, and more dignified, than nine-to-fiving it on the illiterate delusion. He glanced sideways. It was possible that Balfour regarded Alexander P. O'Boye as one of th? flowers of his list. He was always more hushed and pious when it came to the fiction and the poetry. In any case it was Richard who was now Fiction and Poetry Editor at the Tantalus Press. He didn't have to do what Balfour did, which was mark up the biographies of pet goldfish and prize gherkins, the thousand-page treatises that supposedly whipped the carpet out from under Freud and Marx and Einstein, the revisionist histories of disbanded regiments and twilit trade-union outposts, the nonfictional explorations of remote planets, and all the other screams for help.

"One should remind oneself," said Balfour, as he said every week, "that James Joyce initially favored private publication." Then he added: "Proust, too, by the way."

"But that was … Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. "Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard."

"Nabokov," suggested Balfour.

"Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.?

"Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce."

Balfour was always doing this. Richard expected to learn that Shakespeare got his big break with a vanity publisher; that Homer responded to some ad whining for fresh trex. The Tantalus Press, it went without saying, was not a springboard to literary eminence. The Tantalus Press was a springboard to more of the same: to Another Gift from Genius. "Private" publishing was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution. The Tantalus Press was the brothel. Balfour was the madam. Richard helped the madam out. Their writers paid them .. . And a writer ought to be able to claim that he had never paid for it-never in his life.

"What have you got?" said Richard.

"Second World War. It looks rather controversial."

"The myth of the six million?"

"He goes further. He argues that the concentration camps were run by Jews and that the prisoners were all Aryan Germans."

"Come on, Balfour. You're not taking that."

Had he been around for the Holocaust in which all four of his grandparents were enslaved and then murdered, Balfour would have been dead half a dozen times over. Pink triangle, yellow star: it would have been a complicated badge he wore, in his last days. Racially subhuman (Jewish), sexually perverted (homosexual), mentally unsound (schizophrenic), physically deformed (clubfooted) and politically deviant (Communist). He was also a vanity publisher; he was also entirely uncynical. Furthermore-and as it were disinterestedly-Cohen was a serious collector of anti-Semitic propaganda. Look at him. There never was a gentler face, Richard thought: the bald brown head, the seashell undulations of his temples, the all-forgiving orbits of his hot brown eyes. Balfour was an erratically generous Jew who also got into weird states about money. When they all ate lunch together, in some caff, or sandwich nook, Balfour would either quietly pick up the bill or ask for exactly calibrated contributions-and then grab everyone's money and seem about to bolt for the door. He would talk in a loud and irrelevant voice, and then simmer down, slowly. It was atavistic, Richard felt: Balfour had been on the road for two thousand years. Curiously, Richard also felt that Balfour loved him but wanted to destroy him … He had another hobby which Richard suspected was also a sideline: faking modern first editions. In his casual employ were several little hermits and other little maniacs who,

overnight, could knock up astounding facsimiles of a Sons and Lovers, a Brighton Rock, a Handful of Dust.

"It's not my business to question an author's views or his findings.?

"Findings? They're not findings. He didn't find them. They found him. Go on, Balfour. Destroy it unread."

The downstairs office of the Tantalus Press was communal: eleven people worked there, arranging things like translations. Richard wasn't yet clear how it went. Translations of this crap, into French, say? Or translations of French crap, into more of this crap? Anyway Richard sat ensconced upstairs, with the boss. Their office was comfortable, even tasteful, but diligently unluxurious (Balfour enjoyed saying, as an ordinary publisher would not enjoy saying, that his operation was nonprofit-making), and you were allowed to smoke in it. A Communist could hardly forbid smoking. As well as Communists, sick people, the racially inferior-the unnecessary mouths, the life unworthy of life-the German state killed malingerers, troublemakers, shirkers and grumblers. But not smokers. Richard might have faced the ultimate penalty for grumbling (and for much else), but not for smoking. Hitler disapproved of smoking. Stalin didn't, apparently. When the Russians were repatriating the wanderers of Europe, when the war was over, every itinerant under their care was granted an astonishingly-almost an unsmokably- generous allowance of tobacco: even children, even babies. Balfour paid Richard very generously for his one day a week.

"I think we might have found a rather promising poet. Rather strik ing, for a first collection." ?;

"Sling it over . . . Good name. Keith Horridge. Very good name, said

Richard.

Who was aware that if he worked here two days a week instead ot one he would be finished, humanly, within a year. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Braced at first by the Saharas and Gobis of talentlessness which hourly confronted him, he now knew this stuff for what it was. It wasn't bad literature. It was anti-literature. Propaganda, aimed at the self. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Whereas the finished typescripts, printouts and flabby exercise books that lay around him here just hadn't made it out of some more primitive form: diary, dreamjournal, dialectic. As in a ward for the half-born, Richard heard these creatures' cries, and felt their unview-able spasms, convulsed in an earlier version of being. They were like tragic babies; they were like pornography. They shouldn't be looked at. They really shouldn't be looked at. Balfour said with infinite circumspection, "And how is your-how is your latest?"

"Nearly done." And he didn't go on to add-because he couldn t see that far ahead, because men can't see further than the next fight or fuck-that his latest might be his last. Not just couldn't see: couldn't look. That couldn't be looked at either.

"If for any reason you don't find a home for it, I would of course be proud to publish it under the Tantalus imprint."

Richard could see himself ending his days with Balfour. This presentiment was becoming more and more common-habitual, reflexive. Ending his days with Balfour, with Anstice, with R. C. Squires, that bus conductress, that postman, that meter maid. Richard the haggard and neurotic ex-prettyboy, in an airless pool of batch or spinst, sparing and unpredictable with his sexual favors, vain, hideous and sullen, and a miserable pedant about his China tea.