Meredith Quartermain - I, Bartleby

She, too, a writer, a novelist, a Hollywood actress with sister Priscilla in Paying the Price , let him take her to Cuernavaca to live in the real fictional house of the imaginary Jacques Laruelle, Under the Volcano ’s Parisian film director, friend of the alcoholic consul Firmin, lover of his wife, Enid, who in draft four real wife Margerie had renamed Priscilla making her an actress like herself and her sister whose real husband, 20th Century Fox studio doctor Bertie Woolfan (after an affair with director Preston Sturges), stabbed himself and bled to death in Priscilla’s arms, telling medics to do nothing, he was a doctor. Real wife Margerie subsequently renaming alcoholic consul’s Priscilla Yvonne and excising from Under the Volcano his morose daughter Yvonne, who brooded over college boyfriends and annual abortions. Margerie trampling imaginary wife Yvonne with a horse reared up in a flaming sky where Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, the Ursas she’d taught him in real Dollarton whirled a carousel around Polaris. The Horse in the Sky , the Pegasus in her novel that her imagined Thurles, a black-browed ruffian maidservant, craved to ride. Real wife Margerie imagining Lady Althea disowned for marrying her groom, Lady dying penniless leaving her daughter Thurles to drunken stableman father, Dungarvan. Thurles hiring on as maid to white-columned mansion Felicity who teaches Orion, Sirius, and Procyon to her stubborn, determined maid. Imagined gentleman husband of imagined wife Felicity looks boyish and happy as he reads aloud the history he’s writing of Lenawee County, Michigan, in the fictional house where he lives with his wife, mother, two children, and servants. Real-life Margerie (living in shack on pittance from real husband’s disowning father) imagining Thurles, rescued by grandmother’s money, buying the stable, buying stormy black stallion, and keeping drunk father, Dungarvan, as groom. Imagining Thurles in a timeless instant when horse and rider leaped against the sky , then hurling her heroine under its trampling hooves.

In her next novel, real wife Margerie overdosed imagined wife Jocelyn on heroin (real husband hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and mental breakdown in Port-au-Prince, and then again in Paris). The imagined husband, an English playwright, who went through life like a ghost and nothing seemed real but the words that were going oh so slowly and with what agony , leaves wife in Swiss clinic, meets American Jocelyn travelling in Italy. Real-life Margerie’s playwright dreams of Ibsen, Strindberg, Eliot, Fry, he would rebirth the Joycean mélange, the grand poem-novel-play, right down through German expressionists, constructivists, Cocteau, the Russian use of spectacle. Real-life Margerie makes him play on the beach with imagined American typist, makes Rimini Castle loom over them, a smouldering volcano. Imagined playwright rants about Gradgrinds teaching undergradgrinds, playwright admiring O’Neill, Sartre, impressionism. Tells American typist the road to Provincetown is not through Cambridge [real husband’s alma mater] but through the sea, the honky tonks of New Orleans, the Singer Sewing Machine in Argentina . Every bar in town, she writes, playing Duke Ellington’s “St. James Infirmary” over and over. Margerie the real makes playwright the fiction proclaim jukeboxes the answer of Adam’s race to Heaven which, after the giants, had built the Tower of Babel and confused the tongues and minds of mortals so that even two people who spoke the same language could not understand one another . Then Margerie sends imagined husband playwright and imagined lover Jocelyn into Dante-fabled Castle of Malatesta where handsome Paolo Malatesta sneaks up through trap door of locked-up wife of lame brother and reads Lancelot and Guinevere. Their kiss costs them eternity whipped by the winds of hell.

He drove his crazed heavenly path on sky’s stage, then stuttered at noseless whores and mildewed ronyons. Haunted by Mother Gettle beaming from her tin of soup. Haunted by a stranger’s gawk in the street. Loathing the broken scrap-iron skyscrapers of Enochvilleport, its moldy stock exchanges , its beer parlours like emerald-lit public lavatories . The insatiable albatross of self . He sliced his arms. Banged his head between toilet bowl and wall. Jumped in a hotel pool and breathed water. He said he’d no gift for writing, said he was a plagiarist who wanted to be a poet but became a drunkard thanks to the bully boys and schoolmasters of English literature, the Gradgrinds who ruled the American literary scene. He called his publisher an office boy. Refused to speak at New York parties. Beeped out jazz tunes in a chair by himself. Stood in the white-tiled bathroom in his undershirt flinging bubbles of blood from nose to ceiling. He climbed trees in his pajamas. Shunned his old mentor and guardian, Conrad Aiken.

Margerie’s imagined playwright and American typist trade insults:

You just want to go back to your smug schoolmaster’s life, your plans for fame and success.

Your whole trip over here to track down a husband, isn’t it? I dare say you’ll trap some beetlebrain.

Flirting with servant girls — you’ve found your level.

What a bloody snob you are. She likes me fine. Then you come along and start playing Electra and Medea.

For a playwright, you don’t have much power of invective if that’s all you can think of.

The only remarkable thing about you is you’re not already twice divorced and a widow too, traveling with a beady-eyed Mom, having killed off one meal ticket, on the lookout at the corpse’s expense for another.

He invented himself as Ethan Llewelyn, a prosperous criminal lawyer. At an art film, imagined lawyer meets imagined wife Jacqueline, daughter of a Scottish feminist suicide and a white magician. (Real wife former starlet in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, The Sign of the Cross , and Cleopatra .) He imagines her not wanting anything obvious from life, unchanged by even their ghostly imagined son. Pictures her not a joiner, not a stitcher, not a social busybody. Real Dollarton shack burns down, like imagined one in Niagara, lawyer driven to leave his practice by his belief that his own fears are causing fires to spring up around him. They wander from place to place. Like the hero and heroine, Ethan reflects, of separate films playing in separate and adjoining cinemas .

He imagined Mr. and Mrs. Wilderness, Sigbjørn and Primrose. Or she was Astrid Storlesen or Lovey L’Hirondelle or Tansy Fairhaven. Sigbjørn Wilderness an unsuccessful Canadian composer or an American writer on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Rome or an alcoholic jazz musician. Real Margerie typing away La Mordida , where Sigbjørn and Primrose bus to a fiesta in Tecalpulco, Sigbjørn watching devil dancers he’d written into his Valley of the Shadow of Death (real-life Volcano ), watching in this new novel, La Mordida, a sinister figure that real Margerie wrote in her real notebook shuffled round and round in tattered clothes carrying a little stuffed ferret.

With each new sight in their travels, Sigbjørn’s brain clamoured with so many poems — had he not gone mad with them — that he could see nothing at all except through Primrose’s eyes. Out of spite, he refuses to look at craggy windswept scenery, sees instead a scene from his Valley novel, then thinks, It was as if he [Sigbjørn, the novelist] were the character, being moved about for the purposes of some other novelist, and by him, in an unimaginable novel, not of this world [the world of an imagined novelist in a novel about himself encased in the unimaginable world and novel of the author Lowry]. Sigbjørn nevertheless lacking all interest in “character” and holding nobody more disastrously ill-equipped than the novelist to observe such a creature. Real people, Sigbjørn thought, are good or evil omens, menaces, warnings, emblems, investments, wastes of time. Least of all to be trusted were those novelists claiming to love their characters , since almost no one, Sigbjørn included, was capable of loving others. Sigbjørn mulls over suicide.