Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

He had a little pack of file cards on which he wrote words and phrases that took his fancy, and he constructed stories out of them. Stories, okay, not the fast track to debt-free nirvana, but you can’t be always breathing down your own neck. Think of Gurrelieder . Something that starts out small and self-contained can morph (“morph”! English is so great!) into an extravaganza. You have to give the horse its bit.

He was sane enough to spot likely words in a text, and sane enough to write them on a file card, and sane enough to string them together, or rather doing these things kept his mind quiet and good. He didn’t know if he could do much more. But it was nice not having to be cheery and down-to-earth and sensible for cheery sensible down-to-earth Dutch nurses and orderlies. It was okay now to lie quietly on the bed staring at the wall.

He got an effusive e-mail from the girl who had made coffee late one night.

Probably she got his address from the people who published the novellas.

He wrote a polite reply.

An effusive reply came within 10 minutes. There was a lot more sincerity than he knew what to do with.

She mentioned talking to her agent and his regretful comments on translation in the United States.

He was already a bit tired but clearly this was a lead which must be followed. He explained a little about the file cards and writing in English.

Fifteen minutes later, when he was starting to hope that was an end of it, a new message popped up. She had talked to her agent who would love to see some pages.

He could not say why, but he really disliked that use of the word “pages.”

At this point he was ready to go back to bed.

This was not the way to deal with all those credit cards.

She had included the agent’s e-mail address. He clicked on it and attached a Word document (after all these years he still hated Word). He explained to the agent that he normally wrote in longhand but this was what he had happened to type up.

He went outside and lit a Marlboro. If he ever had a lot of money, really a lot of money, he would just buy this place and then he could smoke inside.

Ralph called Cissy because he was simply besotted with the pages, he had devoured them at a single gulp, if the rest was anything like this—

He wrote an e-mail to Peter Dijkstra asking for a phone number and a time when they could talk.

Peter Dijkstra was not wildly keen on the phone but these things must be done. He gave the number of the hotel and proposed a discussion at 11 am New York time, 5 pm Vienna.

They talked for an hour because Ralph liked to really get to know people before he got to work. “I need to know what you care about,” he said. “All the best writers are obsessives.”

Peter Dijkstra said, “Well, maybe.” If you’ve been insane you mainly try not to let things get to you, but this was not necessarily a good thing to say to an agent. He said, “Actually, you know, there’s one thing. I really like the fact that “front seat” is a spondee. And it’s reflected in the spelling, the two separate words. And one thing I really hate is the way they try to make you agree to “backseat,” which is obviously trochaic. I don’t agree. I don’t pronounce it as a trochee, I pronounce it as a spondee, and I always spell it as a spondee, “back seat,” which has the additional virtue of being logical. But then there were these ridiculous arguments.”

“Uh huh, well, I don’t remember that coming up in the pages you sent me, but if it’s an issue we can definitely deal with it. Send me everything you have,” said Ralph. He wanted to get cracking.

You’d think it wouldn’t be that big a deal, but actually typing a text always felt like this thing you see a lot in Britain, especially in terraced houses, this practice of replacing a small front garden with a slab of concrete. It was apparently quite a common part of “doing up” a house. You would ride a bus down a long terrace of lower middle class houses, and the ones that were freshly painted and plastered all had a square of cement where the garden had been.

At the same time, oddly enough, once the thing was typed it was up for grabs. If you wrote something in a notebook the words just were the marks your pen or pencil left on the paper, but once they were typed into Word people could smuggle in the unspeakable trochaic “backseat” behind your back.

Of course, if you want those words in a notebook to be a solution to credit card debt, there is a bridge that has to be crossed. But if you don’t want to crack up you have to be pretty careful. But again this is probably not a good thing to say.

What he did was he seized on a phrase.

Somewhere online he had come across the phrase “protective of his work.”

It had struck him as the height of banality at the time, but for that very reason the kind of thing someone who “fell in love with a book” would probably take to.

So he wrote an e-mail using the phrase “protective of my work” and promised to send the book when it was finished.

He went out for a beer, because it was restful hearing the Austrians rattle words off their sharp metal tongues. He was gone for some time.

When he got back — it was 4 in the morning or so — he found the phrase had hit the jackpot. Not only had Ralph taken to it, he had been galvanized into talking about the few magical pages in hand to everyone he knew. A magazine had offered $5,000 to publish them as a self-contained story. “I understand that you are protective of your work” — it was a lucky thing that this was conveyed in an e-mail rather than over the phone, as it did not matter that he burst out laughing — “but it would be a real wake-up call for publishers.” A number of startling proposals followed: if authorized to do so, Ralph would ask the publisher of the novellas and stories (long out of print) to “revert the rights,” so that they could then be “bundled” with the new book when put up for auction. This would then trigger a push to translate the five novels immured in their native Dutch; the 1,000-page killer whale could be the next 2666 !

Of course, this is the European fantasy of an American. When other languages need a word for a go-getter they use the word “go-getter,” which is the quintessential American thing to be.

If you have been insane there are so many things you can’t do.

He was able to write a brief e-mail of thanks and acceptance. He felt that he should say something along the lines of Dear Ralph, This is very exciting, but this he was not able to do.

Based on the two pages he had read, he was not a big fan of 2666 .

He went outside and smoked a Marlboro.

He went inside and downstairs and lay down on the white bed.

Ralph too had seized on a phrase, “the next 2666 .”

He used the phrase in an impetuous conversation with Cissy, who said, “Oh, I didn’t know you knew Dutch.”

“No no no,” Ralph said hastily, impatiently. “Something tells me I’m on the right track. For God’s sake don’t mention it to anyone who does, it might get back to the Eldridges. I’m just wrapping up reversion of rights, we don’t want them going behind our backs to Meulenhoff and picking up something else on the cheap.”

“Oh, okay,” said Cissy. Maybe there was an article on Words Without Borders or something.

Ralph made a vague soothing affectionate noise about her book and got off the phone and was soon talking to Rachel, who had seen the pages and loved them.

“ Oh ,” said Rachel, “I loved 2666 .”

She did not ask if he knew Dutch or had even actually read 2666 because Ralph, the thing he could do was build castles in the air and get people to buy them. If he could build a castle in the air for Peter Dijkstra the genius would fly on a magic carpet.