Christine Brooke-Rose - Life, End of

The ipomea, or Morning Glory, is growing up the wall, holding a graceful green parasol above the tiny tyrannosaur, replacing the cavern roof. There are so few true blue flowers left these days, now that the cornflower has long been murdered out of the cornfields by insecticides, leaving the stronger poppy to scatter as best it can along the roads, to the sorrow of Ceres, left behind in the hindbrain at war with the front but still unable to sweep up there with the cerebroom, and turning to the cerebellum, whose task is the body balance. She is, however, cleverer than Orpheus in her bargain with Hades to get Proserpine back, half and half the year, thus creating the seasons, whereas Orpheus receives a hundred per cent return on one condition, disobeyed, thus losing at hundred per cent, and being torn apart. So Nature is wiser than Man. Than the Poet. Well, Odysseus the Cunning does better, receiving ghostly communication for oxblood.

But the blue. The ipomea flower is veering towards mauve, rather than last year’s true blue. Yes, well there’s the iris, also more purple, and catmint, lobelia, and of course gentian blue. A mountain flower. Unreached by human poisons.

Below the right of the Cavalier-Grenadier is an enormous head, unnoticed before, occupying three rows of stones instead of one. Three storeys. First a rectangular hat with a paler topdown triangle as decoration on it or suggesting a képi, on either side of which dark shadows slant up like two eyebrows shooting outwards, the stone below simply with a nose-ridge and dark horizontal lines for cheekbones. The lower level stone is just a beard starting from those cheekbones. Very severe. Who is it? Poseidon? Rembrandt? St Paul?

Then to the right of him — his right — another three-storey head made of a huge hatless bumpy brow at the level of St Paul’s triangularly marked headpiece but plunging well below those dark eyes, looking crushed and crying. Peter then, after the third cockcrow, too much having been asked of him, and so perhaps the not yet apostle Saul turned to on the road to Damascus to save the situation, hence taken up by Protestants. And the Copts, is it? Few die directly for such stories today, except in pockets at the extremes, north west and south-east Europe. And only for power disguised.

Above them both is yet another even bigger three-level face, but vaguer, with a small catface on its shoulder flanked by a laughing girl leaning back. And next to St Peter on the other side a vampire head with a huge soft hat and two large pointed teeth sticking out below. Unless they’re the legs of a tortoise under a shaky shell.

All the heads along the top are sunnier but still looking down. At this end, to the right of the sticking out cut-off Christ is Athena’s helmeted head and her firm strong but undeniably beautiful face.

Omega People, that’s what we are. O.P. or not O.P., that is the question. There is rarely any doubt. Real O.P.s are striking, whatever the efforts to drag the eyelids down over their insensitivity.

Two identical letters arrive, a year ago, real letters, post-box ploppers, from an unknown name, Ogden Parr, an attorney, writing from two addresses, one from Washington the other from New York, each with a different address. So, posh.

He is working on a biography of a famous American lawyer, recently dead, known briefly sixty years ago at twenty-one, so would like an interview.

Giving the dregs of time and energy for no personal advantage seems to become an evident duty of the old, evident at least to others. The e-mail reply is polite, accepting, but informing of the inability to travel, or even go out, so that the interviewer must come here or do it by e-mail. Silence for several months, then another letter, real again: Will you be coming to the States at any time?

Curt reply, cancelling on the grounds that annihilating the interviewee so soon hardly augurs well. But generously giving a short paragraph of what can be remembered after so long. Saying that is all that can be.

A year later, a cringing e-mail letter, confounded in apology, most unusual for an American, saying that the basic work is nearly finished and his only huge regret is missing out a dream witness.

What is his illusion? A dream witness. When he already has the brief summary of everything remembered. The yielding must be due to the amazement, amazed at the cringing? Well, that’s clearly just to include the dream witness. A visit is vaguely arranged for the summer, to coincide with a conference he is attending in Germany. But with one condition, presented as a friendly request to choose as soon as possible between such a visit and an electronic interview, since each is exhausting and doing both is out of the question. But hospitably suggesting that a visit, with chat and a glass of wine, might jog the synapses a bit after sixty years.

A pleasant enough amity arises. He seems to be opting for the visit, without however saying so. He sends his book on Nüremberg, read and praised for its clarity, the praise with two legal questions, one on the nullum crimen sine lege formula versus (or plus?) nulla poena sine lege , the first used by him, the other by his bio-subject in his own book on Nüremberg — are they just variations of the same? And the second about his president apparently committing that very crime formulated by the Allies for Nüremberg: war for war or for speculative threats. Asked for the legal aspect only, since his anti-war view is clear. Could there be an impeachment? And, not said: surely more seriously than for seven lying words and seven drops of semen on a dress? These questions are posed partly out of politeness to show the book has really been read, partly out of genuine curiosity.

The answer is much delayed, but then arrives as yet another total obliteration. Clearly an American vice. The two questions are wholly ignored, understandably but without apology, in favour of his own for two pages, the second method apparently chosen without warning, yet still with the intention of coming this summer. The questions are totally idiotic because still imagining a dream witness converting intimate love-talk into details about law and admin in Washington on the setting up of Nüremberg, did he meet So-and-So and what was said. Why the rudeness? Does he really think that a girl of twenty-one, captain but very junior to the then colonel in question, head of the secret outfit’s American section and approaching forty, both in love, would talk about such things? Apart from pigmy-lion little lectures on the American legal system as opposed to the British, good to learn at that age, the secrecy of their outfit is so secret that nobody ever talks shop outside the office, and the lover’s absence in Washington is naturally supposed to be about the outfit. Does nobody outside literature have a writer’s imagination of another?

Dream witness indeed. A lawyer’s dream.

Generously again after this second annihilation, long answers are e-mail-typed, to show in detail how lovers talk, since he can’t imagine it, in other words why the dream witness is a biographer’s illusion. And the dream witness, become a waking dream, brings the correspondence to an indisputable, discringeable end.

Is this steady annulment of the other a slow result of America’s growing political role in the world? Now insisting on unilateral decisions to attack and destroy but leaving all the reparations to others, in the most murderous conditions while refusing them both permission and protection? The Unilateral States of America? So generous sixty years ago and so polite. Perhaps it’s the long worsening process observed in every empire until it falls.

In fact another biographer requires verification soon after. European this time, working on a writer once known forty years ago before he became justly famous and out-of-ken. That sounds more convincing but becomes equally up-using of the small time and energy of the aged, even if it ends in friendliness after anger at lack of consideration, many months later; the anger partly caused by the preceding build-up of O.P.s. The more yielding there is, to avoid detailing the ailments, the more is demanded, as if no ailments. In any case the anger builds up from case to case. And each case turns into an on-going business.