"He had not heard the news that I was dead": new fiction by CK Stead
I met my Jewish friend Benny Feinstein at a bus stop on the Menton seafront. Living 20 000 kms apart at the extremes of the old Empire we met seldom, e-mailed often, read one another’s books and sometimes reviewed them. We played games of chess, beginning long ago, pre-e-mail and fax, when we would send a move by airmail postcard and wait ten days or a fortnight for the response. Though the slowness of these games gave me so much time to consider, I could only very seldom beat Benny and occasionally hold him to a draw. I was, he assured me, a worthy opponent, but he was a master.
"Are you well?" Benny asked, looking at me closely. He had perhaps noticed the difference. Living in London he had not heard the news that I was dead so was shocked when I told him.
"Well," he said recovering with difficulty, "at least you reached 90 which is more than I expect to achieve." After a moment or two he managed, "And what an oeuvre!"
He was referring to the novels I had published under the name of Carson Norwood, using my mother’s family name mainly because my father’s was Smith. Mine were thrillers, mysteries, crime, noir in the manner of Simenon and Highsmith (influences I always acknowledged) and Benny had translated two of them into German. I had once been compared to Graham Greene, but Greene of the ‘entertainments’ rather than of the ‘novels’. My books were not strictly ‘literature’. They had made me a good living over the years and I wasn’t ashamed of them. But ‘oeuvre’? I repeated the word and laughed. It made them sound so high-brow, so what they were not.
"Yes your oeuvre," my generous friend repeated. "Why not? They will be remembered."
"Maybe one or two of the movies," I said. "The Darkness Angel perhaps – for a decade or three. But that will be for the acting of Daniel Auteuil, not for the writing."
Benny’s family had been in England for three or four generations. He was one of those very good poets who don’t become famous. What makes the difference between one like Benny and one like Seamus Heaney or Jaroslav Siefert, who both won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was something other than poetry and beyond it. It’s that other outside (often political) thing which attracts attention, so the poems are read more closely and the merits they indeed have are noticed and written about. Would Heaney have won his Nobel without Northern Ireland’s Troubles? Or Siefert his without the Prague Spring? They had become fashionable and ultimately (as among the cardinals of the Catholic church) Papabile. The Holocaust was there in Benny’s family story and might have had a similar effect; but he seldom talked about it and had never made much of it in his writing. It had been more a suppressed ache than a cry of pain. It might have been the key to his receiving the attention I always believed he deserved, but that was not to be and now he was past his best.
When I first knew him and we were both living in London Benny published a poem sequence I thought quite brilliant, certainly as good as anything appearing from the fashionable poets of that time, though it seemed to pass (as poetry can so easily do) largely unnoticed. I asked him where its extraordinary eloquence came from. What was his secret source?
He said I was exaggerating its merits; but if there was a source, it was what Flaubert calls "ebony – the black night of the human entity stripped of all beliefs". And he sent me an extract from a letter Flaubert had written to the woman he called La Sylphide about the authors of ancient times: "their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. Just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelias, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do you find that particular grandeur."
Benny was what used to be called ‘a man of letters’; some said a dilettante – to which I would always respond "Not if you mean an amateur, a dabbler, not at all; but certainly an aesthete." He wrote elegant short stories as well as his long and deviously structured poems; he did a lot of reviewing, had written significant studies of Kafka and Proust, and was a small-scale publisher; so if none of the British heavyweights, Faber or Cape, Vintage or Bloomsbury, wanted his work he published it himself. His own little publishing house, Etcetera & Co, was always respected; but when it put out one of his own collections, the poems had the slight taint that comes with self-publication. He had also edited several literary magazines – or rather, the same magazine with changing titles as his backers retreated and were replaced. And then in what might be called the second half of his life there had been his obsession with the painter who went by the name of Sandrine Bonnenuit. He was her favourite male model and had written memorably about that experience. In all of this I rated Benny’s literary significance far above my own. If you wanted to put it crudely you could say I was in it for the living it gave me, he for the distinction he could add to literature and the arts. I think we both understood this difference; but more important was the fact that we liked and respected one another.
I’d been intending to take the bus along the coast to the airport at Nice to catch an evening flight to Paris for a few nights in a small hotel on the rue Madame for one last look at, one last taste of, the City of Light where for a few years in the 1960s I had been a graduate student on a scholarship from New Zealand; but now Benny and I were agreeing there was too much to be talked about, we didn’t see one another often, and now that I was dead, was it likely to happen again? So we walked on past the Vieux Port to the Belle Escale restaurant where many years before, when I’d been living in this town with my wife Elizabeth Hamilton and our three children, Will aged 8, Lottie 5 and Hermione 2, the owner, M. Olivier had welcomed us as regulars, honouring me especially as the author of Jack Without Magic, one of my noir novels which he’d read and always had to mention with a great deal of French fuss as if just by being there I was adding lustre to his establishment. And there’d been one occasion all those years ago when Benny had joined us there for dinner after a cocktail party put on in honour of a visit to the town by an American navy ship – so of course that was where we agreed we must now take a last supper together.
It was one of the privileges of being dead that you could do this kind of thing, revisit old haunts, places that had been special in your life. The memory of the time there with my family way back in the 1970s was vivid, full of joy and sadness. What a strange thing a life was, and how inconvenient that it had to come to an end. As I thought this, and tried to feel it, I noticed there were no tears. I was discovering that death took you beyond joy and sadness into this strange neutrality of fact. There were things it seemed you understood without instruction, in the way a bird understands without instruction that it must build a nest and how to do it. So for example I knew that this gift of return would be with me for a time but it would fade, and soon be lost, after which there would be, for ‘Carson Norwood’ (a designation about to become meaningless) the great Nothing which had always been my one article of faith. I had believed there would be nothing, and so that is how it would be – and I was glad I had not let myself in for anything more shimmering and wonderful like the Disney movies of my childhood, or more dark, dreadful and full of pain. I also ‘knew’ that this present encounter would be expunged from Benny’s consciousness and so from memory. Otherwise the world as it is known to the living would have to be full of ghosts and fairies, radically different from what I had always believed to be the reality.
I thought about Benny’s history and wondered whether when his time came he would look back even on the Holocaust without shedding a tear for the teenage German cousin who had committed suicide in the early years of the war, or for those members of his extended family who had died in Treblinka or Auschwitz; and even whether a meeting with that unhappy cousin awaited him – something that would be much more terrible than our own present encounter. It could be argued that we both, Benny and I, had been (I think the phrase was W.H. Auden’s) ‘lived by history’, but Benny’s life had been nearer than mine to the dark realities of our time.
It was that word ‘oeuvre’ which got us on to the subject of literary reputation. I suspected that although Benny Feinstein the poet was at present largely ignored, he retained a faint hope that his work might be ‘discovered’ after his death and justice done to it in Britain. We both remembered a comic poem Gavin Ewart had published in the London Magazine. It was called "The Black Box". In it he said that "as well as these poor poems" he was writing some wonderful ones that were to be buried "in a big black tin box", only to be dug up and read fifty years after his death.
This is to confound the critics
and teach everybody
a valuable lesson.
We had enjoyed it at the time; but it only occurred to Benny now, as we talked about it, that Ewart might have got the idea from the life of the Italian poet Montale. In the last years of his life, Benny said, Montale had given his young mistress a file of unpublished poems with instruction to publish them in groups, at intervals of one year, for the five years after his death. The effect of this was, as it seemed Montale had intended, that his enemies, who had more or less done with him, disposed of him critically after his death, now had to contend with him again – and so from beyond the grave he had become once again a force in Italian literature.
My response to this was why should Benny not do the same? He could be preparing a collection of new poems, not to be buried in a tin box and dug up after 50 years, but given to someone – "Why not Sandrine Bonnenuit?" I suggested – to be released after his death. This was all well-meant and cheerfully offered, but I recognised it as a mistake when Benny did not look pleased or flattered. Almost certainly he had no new poems; and if there were any they were not of a quality to take the world by surprise. And probably even worse was the fact that, although he might have been on the brink of collecting the Old Age Pension, Sandrine must have been 10 years older. She was a heavy smoker and not in good health, so it was much more likely that she would die first. There was also the fact that she was already famous as he was not, and if she was to be engaged in anything to do with post-mortem reputation, it could only be her own that would interest her. Over the years Benny had often been referred to as "Sandrine’s trophy lover", even "Bonnenuit’s toyboy" – quite unfair to the very real love he felt for her and probably she for him; but there was an inequality between them and she was the dominatrix.
We had found ourselves a table near a window and had given our orders to a man who was clearly not the Olivier of former times but might well have been his son. We had ordered a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and while it was being opened Benny excused himself and retreated to the men’s room. I looked around the busy restaurant. It hadn’t changed much; in fact so little was different it seemed not to belong to the present. And then across the room I saw my family, all five of us – so young and beautiful we seemed, my wife Elizabeth, our two little girls and the small boy (all three with brown duffle coats over the backs of their chairs), and even myself, still quite fresh-faced and bronze with a dark beard; and together with us at the table, two much-braided American naval officers. And now I saw that the waiter who "might well have been Olivier’s son" was in fact Olivier of all those years ago; and as I watched I became myself at that age at that time, so I was no longer an observer of a scene but merged into it, my consciousness of being so much older, and even deceased, slipping away as I became an actor in it, an enactor, a re-enactor.
There had been an official but informal cocktail party to celebrate the visit to the region of the American warship, the USS Caloosahatchee, and Elizabeth and I had been invited, with an assurance that we could bring a guest and even the children. At that time we were quite vocal opponents of the war America was waging in Vietnam and, since this was a warship, we had hesitated, but only briefly. I was after all a fiction writer always in search of new material; and this would be an English language occasion, something that didn’t happen often.
During the cocktails the ship’s captain, Commander Pat Duigan, had told us what an enthusiastic reader he was my novels which, with typical American overstatement, he rated as "equal to Patricia Highsmith’s"; so he had invited our group here after the cocktails and he and his First Mate were treating us to a Belle Escale supper. They were pleasant fellows, and especially kind and nice to the children, though no doubt Cold Warriors at heart and keen for a US victory in Vietnam.
When Benny emerged from the men’s room I was struck by how young and exceptionally good-looking he was. No surprise that Sandrine Bonnenuit should have wanted him as a model; and yet Elizabeth and I thought it strange that she always found a place for him in her rather grim scenes that diminished him. He was a handsome man in her pictures and yet also the hangdog one, the weeper, the dominated and defeated male. It was as if she was at the same time using and punishing him for his good looks.
But at this moment our naval hosts had begun to worry about the weather and consult one another anxiously. The wind was rising, and the sea with it. Outdoors on the wide pavement umbrellas were blowing over and staff were taking them down. It was threatening to turn into one of those sudden and violent storms the Mediterranean, normally such a tranquil sea, is nonetheless famous for. Their ship was anchored offshore, its brilliant flood-lighting still clearly visible, and the Captain was telling us they might have to return to it and organise its removal further out into the safety of deeper water. So it was not long before the party broke up.
By the time we emerged into the street the wind was roaring with a sound like heavy traffic. The phoenix palms that ran the length of the promenade down to the Garavan port were tossing wildly and the many masts inside the breakwater were like a frantic crowd, sending out signals of distress which were being ignored.
Benny was to stay the night with us and next day I was to drive him along to Monte Carlo where he had an assignation with the great Sandrine. The Americans had a jeep and driver waiting for them, and then a ship-to-shore landing craft would convey them out to the Caloosahatchee. So we said our warm farewells and thanks, and Elizabeth and I drove Benny, crammed with the children into the back seat of our Volvo, home to our apartment in the avénue Blasco Ibanez.
After settling the children, and nightcaps for the three of us with a lot of jokes and self-congratulation for not having disturbed the peace with a single reference to Vietnam, Benny was installed on a comfortable pull-out bed in our sitting room and Elizabeth and I retired to the bedroom at the end of the corridor that ran the length of our apartment. We had been asleep hardly more than an hour when the big shutters at the end of the room blew violently open. We were woken by the crash and the continuous banging that followed, and it needed both of us to wrestles the two wings back together and latch them again. Our apartment building was on the edge of Le Pian, an ancient olive grove that was now a public park. Out in the darkness we could see the wind hurling the upper branches of the trees this way and that, causing them to creak and crack.
Asleep again I dreamed that there was a very large mirror on our bedroom wall and in it I could see myself at the head of a queue, Elizabeth, and our three still in their brown duffle coats ranged behind, and at a desk Commander Duigan checking our passports. His gold braid and medals were conspicuous in a way that made them seem ridiculous, and when he stamped my passport and said ‘Welcome to America’ this came as a joke and I laughed in my sleep and the laugh woke me.
In the morning the storm had died down but there was still a big wind, and wild sheets of rain blowing in from the sea. The Caloosahatchee had been moved and was no longer to be seen out there. Over breakfast I we listened to the News. From Vietnam it was all bad. President Nixon seemed to be extending the war into Cambodia. None of us could imagine the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong giving up the defence of their homeland; but nor was it imaginable that the US would accept defeat. And meanwhile in America, and indeed throughout the world – the agitation against the American action became more and more violent. It was a grim episode in world affairs, and how could it possibly end?
When I drove Benny along the coast the sea was still washing up over the promenades and huge posters, blown down by the winds, hung limp and torn or lay below their billboards. Benny told me how fond he was of Elizabeth and of our children, and I gave him a picture of the usual parental anxieties. There were worries about how the older two might be faring in school with the French language. Lottie seemed to like it and knew some French poems by heart. Will understood it but was resistant. Was he perhaps short-sighted as his teacher had suggested, and might he soon need glasses?
Benny had no children of his own, his only marriage had long since broken up without issue, and he said Sandrine had two girls from an earlier marriage, teenagers, and would not want (or possibly could not have) more. He did not speak of their marrying, but seemed to imagine no future for himself apart from the painter.
I dropped him at the garden outside the Casino where he was to meet Sandrine, and then returned to Menton by a slightly circuitous route that gave me a chance to stop at a favourite viewing platform up on the Boulevard de Garavon where we often stopped to take photographs of the scene and of one another. From up there I could see Menton’s old town (the medieval part) down to my right, then the man-made beaches and the Garavan Port directly below, and reaching away to the left the coast of Italy; while behind me and over it all loomed the grey-orange rock faces of the Alpes Maritimes. I was happy to be living there for the moment, and my current novel, The Darkness Angel, set in France and mostly in this region, was flowing beautifully. But the end of that project was in clear sight, and after that where would we go?
We had a half plan to move to England again, perhaps to Oxford for a year or two. It was time for me to set a novel there and try to better establish myself with British readers. But what about the children? Were they not to grow up New Zealanders? And although Elizabeth had been content for these few years to be my companion and supporter, and mother to our children, by the time our youngest was ready to start school she would want to have returned full-time to her profession. The questions so often came down to Where? followed closely by When? There seemed always to be a choice. Freedom was the burden – that and uncertainty about what the outcome might be. So much seemed to depend on those words of mine going down day by day on the page. Did I, did we, did any of us, have a future?
Just three years ago men had landed on the moon, not the magic golden place of myth, song and story but a cold and airless rock. So the drama had not been an unfolding of lyrical mysteries, but the precariousness of the mission and the relief at its success. But from that bleak platform pictures had come back showing us ourselves, a beautiful blue and white orb against the star-pricked blackness of space. To have seen ourselves from the outside, floating against a background of infinity, alone and not masters of, but subject to, its vastness and self-determination: that was the reality and it was good to be assured of it. The stories we humans had so long told ourselves that God, or gods, had made our world, that He or they still ruled it and determined what became of us after death, were all untrue. What was left when all that ancient bric-a-brac was cleared away was only ‘the facts’, and as science revealed more and more of them they were hard, they were grim. For the beautiful blue and white orb everything, it seemed, was ‘in the meantime’. In that ‘meantime’ we were left with one another, with nature and the seasons, with planetary kinship and the human narrative, and with works of the imagination. We were back with Flaubert’s ‘black hole’. His ‘unique moment in history’ was repeating itself. In the same way that we’d learned to accept our own death we now had to accept, in the long term, the Death of our Everything.
I felt as if I had been straining to find my future and could not see past the horizon or beyond next Christmas. These were my Space and Time. Down there the storm was blowing over, and I knew that, if I should remember this moment it would not be one of revelation but of puzzlement and uncertainty. I was inside my own story and its end was hidden. Next week's short story is by She's a Killer author Kirsten McDougall.
