William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Hannah pushed the ribbon of paper forth saying, — The poor bastard who wrote it sends it over to him. Read it, you can see he misses the whole idea. Somebody in the Trib compared it to Nightwood.

— Here he comes now, isn't it?

Hannah looked up, to see Max approach, smiling; to ask, — Hey, can you buy me a beer?

At the next table a girl said, — Plagiary? What's that. Handel did it. They all did it. Even Mozart did it, he even plagiarized from himself, just look at the wind instruments in the dinner scene with Leporello. Someone said he'd been knocked down by a priest riding a bicycle with a red plush seat in the Rue Zheetliquer; someone said she had been knocked down by a nun on a bicycle in Rue Dauphine street: someone with a beard said he had never seen either a nun or a priest on the left bank, and added, — I just got a new holy man myself. — A what? — You know, an analyst. Have you been up to the exhibition of paintings by nuts up in the Saint Anne hospital? We got a nice section, the ones by American nuts. Some of them are dirty as hell.

And someone said, — Nothing queer about Carruthers… to conclude, once for all, the story of that subaltern and his mare.

— Marecones, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit.

— Wie Eulen nach Athen bringen. .

— Marecones y nada mas.

There, on the terrace of the Reine Blanche Rudy and Frank held hands under the table, and talked about the wedding banquet: Caviar Volga, consomme Grands Viveurs, paillettes, homard au whisky, cœur de Charollais Edouard VII, perdreau rôti sur canape. . champagnes, Mumm 1928, Chateau Issan 1925. . — And in the ceremony we just told him to leave out that vulgar part about the bodies of man and woman clinging to each other. They said afterwards that I was quite dewy-eyed.

— Sonny's terribwy upset, so jealous] He trwied to do away with himself, did he tell you?

— How?

— By hitting himself savagewy in the temple with a fountain pen. But where was Big Anna? Is that one jealous too?

— No baby, Big Anna telephoned from some absurd place in Italy. They were going to drive up in some nameless person's new Renault, and they were somewhere in the Fremola valley when it didn't go right, so they opened the hood to look at the engine, and there was nothing in there but an old tire, they must just have dropped the engine right out. So they just left it there, it was the only thing they could do. In the Saint Gotthard Pass, it was the only thing they could do.

— Rudy has the sweetest flowered toilet bowl, but he lent it to someone before we found this place on the Quai d'Orsay, and they just won't give it back. They're growing something in it, and we want to use it.

Across the river, up Montmartre, that hill whose name had been so many times ransomed since Saint Denis showed up carrying his head, an immense lopsided Negro in epaulettes guarded a bar where a heaving hunchback played an accordion like a beast lovemaking, a girl heaved as though about to be sick, and her girl friend said enticingly to a lone stranger, — She dancing, wonderful dancer. You dance? — No. —You pay me drink? — No. —You ingliss? — No. —You swiss? — No. —You jermn? — No. —You hollandais? — No. —You dance? — No. —You pay me drink? The hunchback would go on heaving over his accordion, the girl over the bar, the huge doorman at the door, but they would not see Arny again, stumbling in from his hotel in Rochechouart with his shirt on inside out and the hem of his coat pinned up, for even Henry's Hotel was no longer standing: the day had been a sunny one, and Arny, finishing a bottle about breakfast time, put it empty in the windowsill and sat down to try to write a letter. — Dear Maude, I am just trying to figure things out… it commenced, and got no further, for he was soon asleep over it, his head down on his folded arms. The sunlight filled the room, and the wallpaper looked like it was going to descend and devour him. Still he slept. The sun caught the bottle, which drew its light and heat to a sharp point on the bedclothes. Arny woke to find himself engulfed in smoke. Before he could stand, it was flames. He got to the window, where there was a sign pasted, possibly by some jester: On est prié de n'ouvrir pas ce fenêtre parce que le façade de I'hôtel lui compter pour se supporter. . Arny did not read French, even when it was written by an American. With some effort he opened the window, smoke billowed out, and the facade of Henry's Hotel collapsed.

In the more fashionable part of town below, tourists continued to stroll the Grands Boulevards, marveling at French cooking, côte de veau, côte de pore, entrecôte, biftec, bistek, pommes frites, pommes frites. The two small-headed youths had brought their young ladies back to the right bank for supper, and they advanced up the Boulevard des Capucines like the horses in a chariot quadriga, stallions on the outside. — Why don't you go up ahead, Charley, see if one of them will approach you, pretend you're not with us, go ahead, I want to see how she does it… None did. They came on, spavined stiff with formality, spaved and gelded, to a small restaurant whose small sign said, Son menu Touristique 400 francs, You Speack English. —Hors d'oeuvres veryay pertoo, puis boeuf a la sale anglaise. — Comment, m'sr? — Boeuf à la sale anglaise. — Comment? — Ici, damn it… He pointed to the menu and repeated. — Ahh oui, boeuf salé à 1'anglaise, oui m'sr. . — That's what I said, damn it, I mean Christ, he added when the waitress was gone, — they can't even understand their own language.

But on most hands the French were still being taken at their own evaluation. They were still regarded as the most sensitive connoisseurs of alcohol. Barbaric Americans, the barbaric English, drank to get drunk; but the French, with cultivated tastes and civilized sensibilities, drank down six billion bottles of wine that year merely to reward their refined palates: so refined, that a vast government subsidy, and a lobby capable of overthrowing cabinets, guaranteed one drink-shop for every ninety inhabitants; so cultivated, that ten per cent of the family budget went on it, the taste initiated before a child could walk, and death at nineteen months of D.T.s (cockeyed on pernod) incidental; so civilized, that one of every twenty-five dead Frenchmen had made the last leap through alcoholism.

They were still regarded as the arbiters of fine art, and Commissioner Clot of the Sureté Nationale could prove it by pointing to the walls of his office which were festooned with evidence: the best modern French painters brought such high prices, changed hands so freely, were so much easier to copy and, most ingratiatingly, had no histories, that no one need bother producing "old masters." Deluged as he was even now with the work of someone who was buying originals, making and selling (perfect) copies, and selling the originals later elsewhere, Commissioner Clot remained confident of his prey: "If forgers would content themselves with one single forgery, they would get away with it nearly every time. ."

To the end, the world's most exemplary models of free men (as their vigorous succession of governments, and singular adroitness of tax evasion, witnessed); of thrift and provident husbandry (with three or four billion dollars' worth of the world's gold dead and interred in back yards); of sophisticated modernity (one had only to dial Odéon 8400 to get the time, the dissection of the latest minute scarcely understandable but, badly worn as it was, recorded by a famous French comedian); and still the favored child of the Church. .

— Well she says she got athlete's foot in one of the baths at Lourdes, said someone entering the Louvre; as an Italian coming out observed, to no one, that the sculptures of Michelangelo he had just seen inside were placed — coll' arte ben conosciuta di tradimento francese.