And Then There Was No One

Gustav Slavorigin (born July 4, 1955, died September 11, 2011) was murdered in the small Swiss town of Meiringen on the third day of its Sherlock Holmes Festival. That much is in the public domain. Nor, I imagine, will it come as news to my readers that it was in Meiringen’s museum of Sherlockiana that his body was found by the festival’s organisers, alarmed at his prolonged absence from a formal reception of which he was the guest of honour. As everybody also knows, he had an arrow through his heart.

Even before the peculiar circumstances of his death enhaloed his name with a morbid new aura, he had of course been the object of fierce speculation by Britain’s and the world’s media, and if there are readers out there discouraged by the prospect of having the sensational if stale details of ‘the Slavorigin affair’ rehearsed yet again my advice is to ignore this Prologue and proceed at once to page 23, where Chapter One awaits them. I am alive to the danger of redundancy. But I do feel that, if what I am about to relate is to be
adequately contextualised, it will be necessary, at the risk of boring a reader or two, to narrate not only the private history but the public prehistory of those events which drew to their dreadful climax in the Bernese Oberland. Short as this
tour d’horizon
will be, I still wish to apologise in advance, as Pascal did in one of his letters, for not having taken the time to make it shorter.

Slavorigin was actually born in Sofia, capital of Communist Bulgaria. (An unfunny joke which none the less pursued him throughout his adult life was that, although he impressed strangers meeting him for the first time as being as quintessentially English as the Prince of Wales, he was in reality, ho ho, of ‘Slav origin’.
*
) His banker father, however, was sufficiently well-off and, more to the point, sufficiently well-connected to emigrate out of that unhappy land if and when he pleased. Hence Gustav himself became a Londoner at the age of four and, except for his student years, remained one until his death. His gap year, incidentally, and much to the amusement of the braying upper-class lefties who comprised his set, he spent ‘roughing it’, I recall him quipping, as the pampered guest of family acquaintances in Amagansett, Long Island.

It was while he was still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, where we were contemporaries, that he wrote and published his first novel,
Dark Jade,
a semi-autobiographical
account of a fiery homosexual relationship which instantly made his name and saw him chosen as one of
Granta
’s Twenty Best Novelists.
†
That was succeeded, three years later, by what I and most people have always regarded as his very best piece of fiction,
The Lady from Knokke-le-Zoute,
about a Belgian divorcee in her late thirties who, after being mugged in the forecourt of the railway station at Nice while on solitary vacation, despoiled of her passport, travellers cheques, credit cards and suitcase, rapidly subsides into first destitution then prostitution. In the hands of another writer, a short-order romancer whose brilliance depends upon his remaining ceaselessly aware of his own limitations, a Zweig or a Bunin, it would have constituted no more than a twenty-four-carat gem of a short story. What Slavorigin made of this slim yet promising premise was a multi-character fresco stretching to three hundred dense pages, a ‘scathing indictment’, as more than one hack reviewer was pleased to describe it, of the moral bankruptcy of globalised capitalism. It won him – and it would have provoked a scandal had it not – that year’s Booker Prize.

There were to be four subsequent novels.
‡
(He was not a
prolific writer and, the heir to one of Eastern Europe’s greatest fortunes, he never had to be.) The first,
A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes,
the account of a deadpan young madman who, in the book’s opening paragraph, scrawls ‘Not to be. That is the answer.’ on the back of an unpaid phone bill and, in its closing paragraph, swallows, one by one, a jumbo tube of barbiturates, disappointed all but his unconditional admirers by its absence of humour and its flirtation with the dated fad of magical realism: ‘turgid’ was a word that began to be applied to his style. The second,
The Boy with Highlights in His Hair,
a surprisingly soggy coming-of-age tale and more of a novella than a novel, passed almost unnoticed (although it was the only one of his works to be filmed – wholly unsuccessfully, I might add). But it was with the third that he enjoyed a spectacular return to critical favour, even if it sold considerably fewer copies in Britain and the United States than he was accustomed to.
Wayfarer
, a vertiginously synoptic six-hundred-page-long overview of his native country’s twentieth-century history, traces the individual destinies, some of them interlinked, some not, of thirty-eight school-children who posed in the nineteen-twenties for an end-of-term class photograph which its protagonist disinters exactly half-a-century later while searching through his papers for his own birth certificate in order to prove to the authorities, of whom he has fallen foul for a never specified reason, that he is one-hundred-percent Bulgarian. The novel’s formal and stylistic maestria was undeniable, and Slavorigin was once
more nominated for the Booker (he lost out to a Caribbean writer whose name the world has already forgotten), although I have to say that I personally tried twice to finish it and failed both times. (I doubt even God – who sees, and presumably also reads, everything – managed to get to the end.)

What followed was three years of silence. It was an all very relative silence, though, as he seemed to be seldom out of the newspapers, partying at Annabel’s, holidaying in Elton John’s Riviera villa with his newest boyfriend in tow (to his great credit, he never sought to conceal his homosexuality: the famous first sentence of
Dark Jade
was the brave and noble ‘I have always pitied any man who wasn’t gay’), firing off regular broadsides in the
Guardian
at the increasingly repressive policies of the Blair government. Then, when his peers were just beginning to forget that there had once been more to him than the playboy polemicist, there appeared – precisely, out of the blue – the book that was to transform his life and propel it to its premature and horrible end,
Out of a Clear Blue Sky.

So much has been written about that book, even the most motivated of readers may well believe that this is one stepping-stone which can be leapt over. Yet I repeat: to comprehend what followed, and what follows in this memoir, we really must immerse ourselves twice in the same river.

The first surprise (of so many!) of
Out of a Clear Blue Sky
was that it wasn’t a novel at all but a loosely organised collection of essays, rambling, discursive and more than
somewhat repetitious. The next surprise, considering its title and, in retrospect, its unfortunate jacket illustration – the much-reproduced snapshot of the second hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 175, about to smash into the World Trade Center like a motor-powered model plane remote-controlled by a mischief-making brat – was that only one essay in the book, the last, dealt directly with the September 11 atrocity. And the third, for which his hitherto hazy left-leaning politics had not prepared us, was the sheer ferocity of his anti-Americanism, not only George Bush’s America but America
tout court.
‘Once a millennial dream of generosity, tolerance and energy,’ he wrote, ‘Whitman’s rich and multifarious “continent of glories”, rugged, rowdy, aphrodisiac, wild, elastic and irresistible, it has become a poisonous carnival of bottomless bathos populated by millions of nice, ordinary, gee-shucks freaks and crackpots.’ Oddly, the one popular American artefact he owned to having a lingering fondness for was Coca-Cola, drinking three or four bottles of the stuff –
never
cans – every day of his life.

Since even I would find it tedious reiterating the book’s contents in their entirety, I shall limit myself here to reminding the reader of a few of its polemical high spots.

The opening essay, on popular culture, was drolly headlined ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, the regular
envoi
of the old Burns and Allen TV show.
§
Slavorigin had always been a
passionate
cinéphile
and had, in his journalism, expressed admiration for the work of Welles, Kazan, Kubrick and kindred neo-baroque American filmmakers.
¶
In ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, by contrast, he flayed the entire mainstream Hollywood cinema as it is currently constituted, a ‘terminally infantilist’ cinema whose products he likened to greasy Big Macs – ‘and the so-called “indies” are Little Macs leavened with a few limp lettuce leaves’. Well, why not, that’s fair comment, and there are probably many of us ready to meet him halfway. But consider this: ‘If you have ever had the chance to watch those German films which were made during World War II by directors of real reputation – G. W. Pabst’s
Paracelsus,
to take a single example – you will know how hard it is to pass judgment on their strictly cinematic qualities, less on account of the embodied element, restrained but pervasive, of propaganda than because we cannot help reminding ourselves that the actors who appear in them were themselves Nazis, or else Nazi fellow-travellers, or else moral morons prepared, for the sole furtherance of their careers, to collaborate with the unspeakable. So it is today with the contemporary American cinema. How is one to evaluate a new film when all one sees on the screen, leering obscenely into the auditorium, are the neo-Nazoid faces of Hollywood’s current crop of performers, faces as putrid as faeces [oh, come on!], corroded by their very Americanness as an alcoholic’s by a lifetime’s intake of gin?’ Or this, of one cultish director in particular, whom I dare not name, since Slavorigin himself, had he not later had more parlous tribulations to contend with, would without doubt have been hauled into court on a charge of defamation of character: ‘X is an asshole and his movies resemble what oozes from assholes. They leave skid marks on the screen.’

The next essay, ‘The Statistics of American Stupidity’, was even more of a shocker. In it Slavorigin presented his readers with a childish if seductive proof that a statistical majority of Americans must indeed be as stupid as many non-Americans have always believed them to be.

‘The first thing we should note,’ he argued, ‘is that in 2004 George Bush won his second Presidential election (against Senator John Kerry) by approximately 50.7% to 49.3% of all votes cast. Let us simplify these percentages by rounding them out to 50/50%, from which it follows, if we
observe equally that only 60% of the eligible electorate cast a vote, that 30% of the country’s adult population voted for Bush. If, then, we agree, as surely we do, that one definition of stupidity is satisfaction at the prospect of George Bush regaining the White House despite his uniquely calamitous first term of office, then we can already state without fear of contradiction that 30% of Americans are stupid. Now let us consider that 40% of the population which did not trouble to vote in the 2004 election and assume, for the sake of the argument, the likelihood of their being divided equally for and against Bush. Clearly, by the same token, the 20% of non-voters who
would
have voted for him are also stupid – as are, however, the other 20% who, notwithstanding the overwhelmingly damning evidence of that first term, were too dopey or too dozy to assist in driving the idiot of the global village out of office. 30% plus 20% plus 20% equals 70%. More Americans are stupid than not. QED.’ (Is the percentage any the less among Brits? I seriously doubt it.)

In the third essay, ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?’, he developed this theme of American stupidity, along with ‘its physically externalised symptom and symbol, ballooning American obesity’, by linking it to what he termed the country’s ‘creeping mediaevalisation’ in matters of religion and patriotism, two terms which, for so fundamentalist a national mindset, had become ‘virtual synonyms’. Let me dip in at random: ‘Were Rip Van Winkle to awaken today after a century of slumber, or even only a decade, he would be amazed
to discover that the United States had meanwhile known an intellectual regression inversely commensurate with its technological progress.’ And: ‘For Americans the Star-Spangled Banner is not merely the national flag, it is the True Cross.’ And: ‘For the Bush administration the Geneva Conventions are just that, a set of conventions.’ And: ‘Yes, admittedly, they [the American people] are warm, friendly, polite, hospitable to strangers and kind to animals, none of which, alas, prevents most of them from being also just plain dumb.’

Since the next six essays were written in the same scattershot vein, the reader will appreciate my letting them pass without extended editorial comment. But to give you the gist of it: Slavorigin systematically excoriated the pernicious despotism of American foreign policy; the lawlessness of the political-military establishment, particularly in relation to its endeavours, by the illegal erasure of damning videotapes, to cover up the pet CIA technique of ‘waterboarding’ political prisoners; the sweeping aside of numberless international treaties; the ineradicable rottenness of the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the equally ineradicable pusillanimity of the Democratic opposition; the kangaroo court of Guantánamo Bay and swinish hazing rituals of Abu Ghraib; the widespread wiretapping of telephones and interception of email messages; the neo-terroristic methodology of the entertainment industry (‘in the America of the twenty-first
century,’ he wrote in one of the book’s more reckless passages, ‘pleasure has come to serve the same function as terror in Nazi Germany’, before going on to describe Disneyland as ‘that Belsen of fun’); the latent chauvinism of the nation’s intellectual elite as reflected in the many book, play and film titles to which the adjective ‘American’ is appended as a talismanic all-purpose prefix (
American Gigolo, American Psycho,
Harold Bloom’s ‘classic’
Emerson and the Making of the American Mind
– ‘Who the Christ cares! Explain Emerson to us, yes please, Bloom, but spare us your ponderous burblings on the American Mind, whatever that is’); the religion of business and the business of religion (‘As P. T. Barnum might have said, there’s one born-again every minute’); the ubiquity of lawyers and liars; and so much more besides.