Exchange Place (14 page)

According to Strange

With the accordion music of the
Maigret
theme still in my head, I opened another of the books that had come to me that morning, Jean Cocteau’s
Tour du monde en 80 jours (Mon premier voyage)
. I had read no more than a few pages when it seemed to me as if I was reading a different book to that called
Round the World Again in 80 Days (Mon Premier Voyage)
, translated by Stuart Gilbert. So it proved. I took the Gilbert from the shelf and compared it to the Cocteau. The format and typographical conventions of each were, of course, different, but so was the sense.

Cocteau: ‘ — <<
Trente milles banknotes pour vous, Capitaine, si nous arrivons avant une heure à Liverpool.
>>
Ce cri de Philéas Fogg reste pour moi l’appel de la mer et jamais ocean veritable n’aura le prestige à mes yeux d’une toile verte que les machinistes agitaient avec le dos, pendant que Philéas et Passepartout, accrochés à une épave, regardaient s’allumer au loin les lumières de Liverpool.
’

Gilbert: ‘ “Sixty thousand dollars for you, Captain, if your ship makes Liverpool before one o’clock.” In Phileas Fogg’s appeal I still hear the call of the sea. Never for me will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the back of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance.’

There are no caterpillars in Cocteau’s French. And the end of the sentence, should, I think, read something like ‘while Phileas and Passepartout, hanging on to a wreck, watch the lights of Liverpool coming on in the distance.’ Nevertheless I had been beguiled by Gilbert’s translation when I first read it on the Dublin train. The caterpillars are a stroke of wayward genius. As I look at it now, I am especially taken by his translation of
prestige
as ‘glamour’. According to the
OED
, the primary meaning of the English word prestige (French from Latin
praestigium
illusion, as in prestidigitation) is ‘a conjuring trick; a deception; an imposture’; the sense of ‘influence, reputation, or popular esteem’ comes later. ‘Glamour’, in modern English, is a shade different to ‘prestige’; but its primary meaning is ‘magic, enchantment’. It is a variant of ‘grammar’, harking back to a time when the study of language, in its incantation of declension, was seen as a magical art. A kind of hocus-pocus. For Cocteau, as he voyages across the globe, everything is glamour and theatre, or an opium dream. In Hong Kong, the streets recall the wings of a stage set; the shops and open windows might be dressing rooms in which consummate actors are putting on greasepaint before coming down to play their parts under the red and green limelight of the streetlamps. And as Cocteau leaves Hong Kong, Charlie Chaplin comes on board, bound for Hollywood. Chaplin has no French, Cocteau no English, but they converse effortlessly through mime,
la plus vivante des langues
, ‘the liveliest of tongues’. Words become gesture.

Translation is the ‘removal or conveyance from one person, place, time, or condition to another; the removal of the remains of a famous person, esp. a saint, to another place; the movement of a body or form of energy from one point of space to another; the action or process of expressing the sense of a word, passage etc., in a different language; the expression or rendering of something in another medium, mode, or form of expression.’ And it occurred to me that reading is itself a form of translation, for every reader must interpret what he or she reads, visualizing the action or the scene described in his or her own way. The text is a series of stage directions, and we furnish the crime scene – the locked library room in a murder mystery, say – with the props of memory and genre, memories of real libraries we have been in and memories of other libraries in other murder mysteries. Each of us enters the room in the book in our own way. Each listener hears a different music, just as each of us is not only who we think we are, but the person seen and thought into being by others. Eyes staring at one’s back. Meeting of glances. We are others in the eyes of others. I am many John Kilfeathers. I could feel the dope talking, so I looked it up, dope from Dutch
doop
, sauce, from
doopen
, dip, mix, adulterate. I thought of Dutch painting, colours mixed on a palette, scumbled into one another to become another, and the smell of oil paint entering the brain through the nostrils, down the neural pathways, reconfiguring the dendrite fractals in a fugue of variant and deviation.

Fugue is also ‘a flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home’. I recalled the once celebrated case of Charles Burns of Belfast, County Antrim, a funeral director and a lay preacher. To all appearances he was a happily married man with a large and devoted family. On 17 January 1887, the day after his fiftieth birthday, Burns withdrew his life’s savings from the local bank, and disappeared without so much as a word to anyone who knew him. After some weeks of ineffective police investigation, his family hired a private detective, John Strange, to look deeper into the matter; some six months later, Strange found him in Westport, County Mayo, working under the name of Cathal O’Byrne as the proprietor of a lodging house. However, when confronted with photographic evidence of his real identity, Burns refused to acknowledge it, saying he had always been Cathal O’Byrne and that the photograph bore no relation to his features. He immediately took the photograph from my hand, said Strange, and went over to the dining-room mirror. Looking alternately at mirror and photograph, he said over and over, How can you say this is me? I am not that man, I am this man that you see before you; and as he did so, said Strange, his eyes met mine in the mirror. There was an uncanny light in them, as if someone else was looking out through those eyes. It sent quite a chill through me, said Strange. According to Strange, Burns expressed a horror of his alleged existence as a funeral director, saying that he was perfectly happy catering to the living; indeed, he was a popular figure in Westport, and all who knew Cathal O’Byrne testified to his good character, and the grace and civility with which he conducted his affairs. Strange sought the advice of the local constabulary, who, after consultation with their colleagues in Belfast, corroborated that this was indeed Charles Burns, late of Belfast. The good news was telegraphed to the family. It was decided for his safety to confine Burns to a room of his own lodging house until the family came to reclaim him. Alas, when they arrived, and the door of the room was unlocked, they found him dead. The body bore no marks of violence, self-inflicted or otherwise; he appeared to have passed away from heart failure in his sleep. It was, speculated Strange in his summing up of the case, as if Cathal O’Byrne, unable to countenance that he was indeed Charles Burns, had willed Burns to die. To sleep, perchance to dream. There were, he concluded, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Through a Glass Darkly

Kilpatrick felt a tap on the back of his hand. Kilpatrick? said Gordon. Kilpatrick looked up and met Gordon’s eyes. For the first time he noticed that they were green. You can stop listening now, said Gordon gently. Kilpatrick came to. Where was I? said Gordon. Yes, said Gordon, I was speaking of the interlocutors. The members of the club. As it happens, I picked up an odd volume of Emerson’s essays the other day in Passage des Panoramas, and when I opened it my eye fell on a sentence that seemed very apropos. Library angel sort of thing, you feel some higher power has intervened. Call it coincidence if you will, but then in our line of business there is no such thing as coincidence. Anyway, essay entitled ‘Clubs’. Discourse, says Emerson, when it rises highest and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our firmament, is between two. We apply that sentiment as a rule. Tête-à-tête that is. You spoke of a John Bourne earlier, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, Bourne, said Gordon, a long story. Tell you what, why don’t we do this in the spirit of Les Caves, said Gordon, you can tell me your story first, then I’ll reciprocate. You did know a John Bourne in Belfast, did you not? Kilpatrick nodded, took a sip of absinthe, and began.

I seemed to know John Bourne before I met him, said Kilpatrick. I guess there would have been prior talk of him in the circles I moved in, so maybe that’s how I picked up that impression. From elsewhere rather than from myself. We are wont to do that, are we not? And Gordon nodded sympathetically. At any rate when I did meet him, and really got to know him, I was beguiled by him, said Kilpatrick. About my height, about five foot eight, dark hair flopping over one eyebrow, somewhat sallow skin, a Roman nose a trifle too prominent for his face, ears likewise, he was not conventionally handsome, but he had presence, and when he smiled that broad smile of his, it seemed to illuminate one’s own face besides his own. I first met him in the Crown Bar in the seventies, I spoke of it before. And one thing led to another. I became his friend, he mine. Perhaps everything seems inevitable in retrospect, but so it was. Why was I attracted to him? I can only answer, because it was he, because it was myself. We were each other’s fate.

Your Bourne is an artist, you say. So is mine. I used to frequent his attic studio at Exchange Place in Belfast. Have you ever been to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin? Some years ago the entire contents of Francis Bacon’s attic studio at 7 Reece Mews in London, from the very plaster of the walls down to the floorboards, were removed and painstakingly reconstructed in Dublin, the floor ankle-deep in archaeological layers of printed materials, photographs, posters, champagne boxes in various states of decay, torn, crumpled or trodden on; everything, including the walls and door, spattered with paint, pots of paints and brushes here and there amid the chaos. When I visited the gallery last year I was forcibly reminded of Bourne’s studio. One of the features of the Bacon studio is a big round art deco mirror propped on a table, the glass covered in hundreds of pockmarks where the silvering has degraded. When Bourne went to view the attic room at 14 Exchange Place, he was delighted to find in situ an old art deco dressing table with a round mirror similarly dimmed and pockmarked. I saw myself through a glass darkly, said Bourne. It confirmed that this was the place for him. He was very influenced by places, by the atmosphere of a room, and it seemed to him he had been here before, perhaps as someone else.

At any rate, when Bourne asked me to write a piece for the catalogue of a show he was putting together, I was flattered, said Kilpatrick. I spent long hours watching him paint, his eyes darting from subject to canvas and back again in a fugue of rhythmic glances, his eyes at times so narrowed as to appear shut, eyelids flickering as if in
REM
sleep. I see him now in his painting clothes, floppy-collared indigo denim workman’s jacket, yellowed white flannel trousers, white boots, all spattered and smeared with a myriad of colours. When I remarked on the white trousers and boots, Bourne replied that he had once played a bit of cricket; they were relics of his varsity days. And I remembered that in the summer months he would often have the radio in the studio tuned to the cricket, one of those big old Echo, or was it
EKO
valve radios, ee-kay-oh that is, all hiss and static, Bourne would keep fiddling with the knob, but I gather that the bad reception had more to do with relative wavelengths than with any fault in the receiver. According to Bourne, light was the fastest wavelength in the spectrum, and given ideal cricketing weather, long bright sunlit days, it would interfere with the slower radio waves. And indeed, as the light began to fade, so reception would improve. The improved reception seemed to clarify one’s inner vision of the match, and as I heard the commentators speak of what was happening, I could see the white-clad figures poised in their fielding positions on the greensward and the sun setting behind a bank of mauve and russet cloud; hearing the pock of bat on ball, I saw the batsmen flickering between the wickets. In lulls of play there would be discussion of the weather conditions, or the state of the pitch, where it might be breaking up as the fast bowlers further wore down an already worn patch for the spin bowlers to take advantage of. I knew little about cricket, said Kilpatrick, and Bourne’s talk was an education for me. Cricket was a game of many dimensions including chance and skill. Temperature, wind, the ambient humidity of the air, all affected the flight of the ball. No one, neither bowler nor batsman, could predict how a ball might spin off a breaking wicket as it landed on a bump, hollow or fissure in the earth. It was the bowler’s job to enlarge the parameters of unpredictability, to keep the batsman guessing. And again Bourne would quote Bacon, The hinges of form come about by chance.

So when I came to write the catalogue essay, said Kilpatrick, I used some cricketing analogies. Bourne had talked about cricketers of the past and how he used to try to emulate them. When he was a boy he read of how the great Don Bradman would, when he was himself a boy, repeatedly hit a golf ball with a cricket stump against the curved brick base of the family water tank, trying to anticipate the unpredictable angle as it bounced back, the boy Bourne copying the boy Bradman, except in Bourne’s case it was an ancient garden wall covered in mosses and lichens. He dreamed of being Bradman, as if he remembered being him in another life, on the other side of the world. In sport as in art one learns by imitation; one can only be oneself by first trying to mirror another. Bourne was indebted to Bacon; through that emulation he had become someone he would never otherwise have been.

Most interesting, said Gordon. I am reminded of the
Meno
of Socrates, where Socrates says to Meno that all enquiry and all learning is recollection. You already know what seems unknown; you have been here before, but only when you were someone else.