All Kinds of Everything

It has always seemed odd to me, the possibility of growing up in a home bare of books.  No doubt it is a sorry fact of life for many children, but I’m certain that such a state of affairs must tend to undermine their development.  To be aware of books as objects, to see them being read and enjoyed, to appreciate them as a source of information and pleasure, these have surely to be firm foundations for education and, ultimately, for success in the adult world.

We never had a great deal in the way of family heirlooms in my parents’ home and the only substantial item that I can think of now is a huge dark wooden veneered cabinet which a plate inside dated to sometime in the 1880s.  It was where my father kept his books.  He had a varied collection: a set of Dickens, Good-Bad books like Holmes and Stevenson and Winifred Holtby, some reference books (including a Whitakers Almanac for 1948 which footnoted the demise of the last surviving officer of the Confederate Army), an Empire Youth Annual, a whole swathe of true-life War literature published in the 1950s, including many daring-do tales of POW camps which I foraged my way through over a series of school holidays, and, strangely, an Olympia Press copy of Junky.

To some extent, I regret disposing of the bulk of them after he died.  I should hate to think of my ‘library’ being torn asunder and despatched back off to the charity shops from which so much of it once came.  But he was a terrible hoarder and, though the books were really the least of the problem, I was faced with a major task in disposing of over 70 years of accumulated clutter and ephemera and, caught up perhaps in a head of steam, the vast majority of the books went off to the shops or the skips.  I suppose this is what happens when any of us die.  Our things, our precious things, that we leave behind us are sifted and shifted and divided and dumped.  And that’s that.

I retained a few of his books – the Dickens, the better of the Good-Bad, Junky and, my personal favourite among the war memoirs, Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean.

Posted to the British Embassy, Moscow, in the late 1930s, Maclean witnessed the effects of the Great Terror and its consequent show-trials, including that of Bukharin.  He also travelled – entirely innocently, he claimed – about the remoter regions of the Soviet Union, penetrating the Caucasus and into the immensity of Central Asia, via the ancient cities of the Silk Road and up to the Oxus, on the borders of Afghanistan.  All this despite the best efforts of Russian inertia and Communist officialdom to thwart him.  During the Second World War he was one of the original members of the Special Air Service (SAS), undertaking irregular warfare across Cyrenaica and the Western Desert and conducting the kidnapping of a pro-Axis Iranian general at the very pivotal point of the war, in 1942, before Alamein and Stalingrad, when it looked very likely that the German pincers would close upon the Middle East.

From 1943, and promoted by now to Brigadier*, he led the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia, which was instrumental in shifting the support of the Western Allies away from the monarchist Chetniks in favour of Tito’s communist partisans.  This shift, with all its consequences for the Balkans, was undertaken on the basis of the brute calculation of total war – who was killing the most Germans.

I thought it right to remind him that the Partisans were communist-led. "Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?" he asked. "No," I replied. "Neither do I," he said. "That being so, don't you think we had better leave it to the Yugoslavs to work out their own form of government? What concerns us most now is who is doing the most damage to the Germans."

All in all, a good rollicking, instructive read, from a consciously conservative perspective, illustrated with maps tracing Maclean’s journeys about Central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans.

I was fascinated with maps as a young child, such that I prevailed upon my parents to give me a world atlas for Christmas when I was 7 or 8.  Far less than agricultural patterns, or desertification or charts of ethnicities, the things that piqued my interest above all were the nation-states of the world, their flags, the names of their capitals, their external borders and their internal administrative boundaries.  Most especially, and possibly under the influence of The Mouse that Roared, I was fascinated with the anomalous micro-states of the world – Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino, Bhutan – and the huge, mostly blank, spaces of at the heart of Africa and of Asia: Chad, The Congo, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

Beyond the bare facts of the atlas that I pored over, with jam-sticky fingers, it wasn’t too easy in that long ago lost age before the Internet and Wikipedia to find out much more about these far flung curiosities and territories without going off to the library. And perhaps not even then. Now, everything about everything is available to anyone who can muster up the energy for a few clicks and keystrokes.

While this fingertip access to the accumulated knowledge of the ages is to be applauded as the greatest gift of Tim Berners-Lee et al, far outweighing all the hustling, slime and tat, that lives alongside it, it can become burdensome too.  Many is the time that I have begun with a simple search upon a place or a person or an event and allowed myself to be led off down winding byways of links and tangents and associations until the whole of a wet afternoon or a dark evening has been burned away beyond recovery.  There must be an utterly apt term for this sort of behaviour and if there isn’t then someone should hurry up and invent it.  Wiki-browsing?  Wiki-dowsing?  Wiki-grazing?  Wiki-wasting?

I picked up Eastern Approaches recently and flicked through its pages, pausing for old times’ sake to look over the maps that had entranced me thirty years before.  Not long afterwards I was sitting at the computer, filling in one of those spaces in the day when it’s too late to go out for coffee, too early to go off down the pub and too wet to get outside and do the very necessary work in the garden, and one thing led to another and I wandered off on a Wiki-trek.

Somehow, those maps came to mind and I was prompted to search on one of those strange territories that I had only ever seen delineated in Maclean’s book, Tannu Tuva, an indeterminate sort of a state, nestled between Siberia and Outer Mongolia, that led a peripatetic independence through the first half of the 20^th century before ‘electing’ to be absorbed into the USSR in 1944.  That was well enough, I found out more in five minutes than I had ever known before about this peculiar place, home to yurts and nomads and Buddhist saints at the very heart of Asia.  Better still – wonder of the wiki – I followed an external link to a YouTube video of an old BBC Horizon documentary, from the days before the BBC lost its confidence and used to make decent documentaries.  The Quest for Tannu Tuva follows the American physicist and Manhattan Project alumni Richard Feynman, his obsession with the place, his struggles to find out much about it in the pre-internet dark ages and his sadly unsuccessful attempts to breach the bounds of the Cold War and get there. 

It is quirky and it is heart-warming and it almost, but not quite, moved me to play the CD of Tibetan monk-chant that I allowed myself to be pressured into buying from a friend who ran a record shop when I was too flush with funds and which has only ever come into its own when I’ve been hosting a party and wanted everyone to get off home.

*Maclean shared a rare distinction with Enoch Powell, both being among those very few men who began the war as privates and ended it as brigadiers.

The Tale of the Tramp

‘What you fucking looking at cunt?’

‘What you fucking reading, cunt?’

Not that it was any of his business but I was flicking through the introduction to The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, sitting outside a Bloomsbury café in sunshine made more glorious by its rarity.*

I’d risen early, come into town on the train and done a little browsing about the bookshops and stalls around the Brunswick Centre and Lamb’s Conduit Street.  It had been a very trying week at work, in close succession to several other very trying weeks at work and now as I settled down with a coffee and a pastry to pore over my purchases this tramp had started, first of all in general upon the customers of the café and then, more specifically, and for no particular reason that I could see, upon me.

The first rule of starting upon people has to be to be harder than they are.  The tramp had made a serious miscalculation in this respect.  I don’t know how old he might have been – tramping almost certainly takes it out of you – perhaps about 50, not much above five feet tall, slightly built, distinctly grubby and limping along with a walking stick.  Hardly hard.

As I say, I had been having something of a time of it at work, suffering the slings and arrows of the edicts, whims and opinions of those far above my pay-grade and being obliged, in order not to further diminish my career-prospects, to restrict myself to silence or, at best, very guarded and diplomatic responses.  Such a state of affairs can lead to the build up of a deep dark reservoir of angst, which only needs a little provocation to bring about a breach in the dam allowing it all to come flooding out at once.

‘Don’t you fucking start on me!  D’you want me to come and kick your fucking stick away?’^#

I was half out of my seat before I realised it, ready to give this bastard the pasting that he was asking for. 

It was just as well that the tramp backed away snarling before shuffling off down the street.  He was a nasty man and thoroughly deserving of the tongue-lashing that I gave him but it could have been unfortunate had matters really descended to fisticuffs.  For one thing, no one else at the café had reacted to the insults thrown in their direction, although none but I had been on the receiving end of a personal attack.  Secondly, had things got out of hand and the police been summoned it wouldn’t have been at all clear where right lay and a spell in the cells would have rather spoilt my day.  Finally, in this age of smart phones and instantaneous social media it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine HOMELESS DISABLED MAN BEING BEATEN UP IN THE STREET BY FASCIST going viral on YouTube and that certainly isn’t the sort of notoriety that I would wish to attract.

The Tale of the Tramp was told and retold a number of times over the next few days, with the uncouth language either stated in full or merely alluded to, depending upon the audience.  There was no need for allusion that afternoon as I met up with William Gazy and several of his pals for a boozy progress about the West End, from the Coach and Horses to Bradley’s Spanish Bar, on into the evening via the Fitzroy Tavern and which, memorably, featured a rendition of Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the style of the Reverend Doctor Lord Paisley. 

I have, for sometime, held a mixed opinion of Wharton.  I adored The Age of Innocence, both upon the page and on the screen.  I do believe that it ranks as one of Scorsese’s best movies.  I was far less enamoured of The House of Mirth, warming to neither book nor film and I have never got around to either Ethan Frome or The Buccaneers.

It was a piece by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker (February 13-20 2012) that prompted me to keep an eye out for The Custom of the Country in my bookshop browsings and the search bore fruit on this brightest of Saturday mornings.  There seems to me to be strong odour of Balzac about this book, which isn’t altogether surprising given that Wharton made her home for so many years in France.  The heroine, of sorts, Undine Spragg could just as well have sprung from the Comedie Humaine.  She is, as Franzen says, ‘almost comically indestructible, like Wile E Coyote’, progressing from the city of Apex in the Mid-Western heartland, through brash and graceless anonymity, marooned in the splendidly named Hotel Stentorian, bludgeoning  her way into New York society and trampling a trail of debts and marriages and a Reno divorce, suicide and scandal and a cast-off child, plundering Paris and a Normandy chateau, on to the point of becoming the bride (for the second-time around, as it turns out) of one of the newly-richest men in America. 

She is spoiled and selfish and possessed of the skin of an avaricious rhino. 

She is magnificent.

*And when, by the way, did the phrase ‘European Monsoon’ enter the meteorological lexicon to describe rained-out springs and summers?  See also ‘White Cloud’.

^# This was a first: I have never, ever, before threatened to kick someone’s walking stick away, though perhaps it prefigures arguments over the best seat in the TV lounge 30 years hence.

He got an Icepick

The BBC has begun showing a series of programmes about Punk Rock – Punk Britannia.  So far so good.  The first offering was on the precursors of Punk – the Bowie/New York Dolls influences and the pub-rock scene. 

I possessed only a cursory knowledge of some of this, particularly the minutae of pub-rock, so it was both enjoyable and instructive.  As with all TV documentary, however, it is only when you watch a programme on a topic that you are really familiar with that you realise the corners cut, the omissions of inconvenient truths, the unchallenged re-stating of the legend, and the stock-footage employed out of context.  Most other punk documentaries I have seen have used images of rubbish piling up in the streets from the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 to illustrate London circa 1976 in much the same way as lazy or ignorant producers of documentaries about the Great War almost always turn to the same bare half-dozen sequences of Tommies going over the top and of exploding mines to represent any and all points between 1914 and 1918.

It remains to be seen, then, how good, or bad, the rest of the series will turn out to be.  Well worth a watch, though, was the feature on TV Smith, one-time singer of The Adverts.  A true-punk believer, still lugging his guitar case about from stage to stage, this treat of a programme offered a crash course to any budding musician in the tropes of musical-differences, money worries, bad management, the fickleness of the music-press, the incompetence of the record-industry and ill-advised cover art.

Aged 9 or 10, Punk was my thing, mine and a few of my school mates.  In retrospect this was more or less accidental and I might just as easily have become an early adopter of Disco.  But lacking the influence of any siblings my musical influences were the hand-me-downs of friends’ older brothers, mediating the NME and Sounds and Melody Maker, and since they were into Punk I inevitably was too.

 I can see now how the ripple effects of this have affected me down the years.  Sticking with Punk and post-Punk and New Wave and Alternative music through the remainder of my school years inoculated me in large part to the mainstream culture of the 1980s.  It meant that when I first started going out to clubs and to gigs, when I was 17 or so, I made a beeline for the left-field and many of the friends that I made then are still my friends now, albeit rather broader in the beam, with more sensible haircuts and less wild-eyed than they once were.

The first three singles that I went out and bought for myself, as opposed to having them bought for me at birthdays and Christmas were:

Like Clockwork by The Boomtown Rats, bought I remember in Woolworths in Blackpool;

If the Kids are United by Sham 69;

Identity by X-Ray-Spex.

Classics all, as it turns out, and ones that I wear as something of a badge of pride.  They were followed, through 1978 and 1979, by singles from Blondie, Generation X, the wonderful Rezillos, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, The Undertones, The Clash and The Pistols, in their, seemingly, final pantomime phase.  If this all sounds far too impossibly cool for someone not even in their teens, I dare say that there were some howlers too.  Even now, I blush at the thought of having bought a single by The Rich Kids, Glen Matlock’s underwhelming post-Pistols outfit and the school-yard scorn that descended upon me as a result.

The past is a foreign country.  They did things differently there.  The British seventies were lived out in what was more or less a monoculture.  There were only three TV channels, with a very limited amount of music beyond Top of the Pops, and really only one radio station – Radio 1.  There was the music press too, of course, but essentially one’s awareness of what was out there, musically, was filtered through that mainstream heavy gauze.  And in that long-ago age, before free downloads were even thought of, constrained by the economics of pocket-money, I probably spent a lot of time weighing up one purchase against another and astutely catching the bus into town in order to get into Woolworths on the day that the new Top-40 was announced, when those singles that had dropped out of the chart were marked down in price.  The point being that between limited knowledge and limited purchasing power and the hard critical analysis of the playground, you were virtually obliged to play the same records over and over again, to be word perfect in the lyrics, and to damn-well like them, whether you secretly liked them or not. 

Once again under the daunting influence of a friend’s older brother, the first album that I went out and bought for myself with my very own money, as opposed to those Christmas gifts of the K-Tel compilation Music Explosion and the collected works of Ken Dodd and the Diddymen, was the first Stranglers album, Rattus Norvegicus.

Whether they were entirely suitable role models for a young boy or not, what with strippers, heroin, Jet Black always looking like an old fat broken-down biker, and singing about beating up women, is beside the point.  The Stranglers were my band for a number of years, through thick and critical thin, until the weight of all the evidence convinced that they had become irredeemably rubbish.  I bought each single as it came out and played it over and over again, and religiously sat down to watch each Top of the Pops performance – if video-recorders had been available then I would have watched them over and over again, and I bought each album as it was released, a great favourite being No More Heroes.

I came upon Barbara Kingsolver somewhat by chance.  I was vaguely aware of her as an author but wasn’t at all disposed towards picking up one of her books until a trip away found me bereft of any reading material for the return journey and the friend I was staying with suggested The Poisonwood Bible.

I tolerated, I’ll say no more than that, this novel about a Baptist missionary and his family living through the throes of independence of the Belgian Congo, striving vainly to save the souls of the natives.  The narrative structure, with each chapter rendered in the voice of one or other of the female members of the family, is interesting enough but I felt that the book would have benefited by being slashed by 20 or 25%.  “I get it!” I wanted to shout:  Big Daddy America in its hubris sets out to save the world, to shape it in its own image, only to let down itself and those that it is ostensibly trying to help.

A little while later I mentioned Kingsolver to another friend who urged me to read The Lacuna. 

Now this this turned out to be something else altogether.  Warm-hearted.  A joy to read.  Beautifully written.  Forget the cliché, I really did not want to put it down. 

As with TPB, there are layers of narrative, the majority from the diaries of the Mexican-American central character - Harrison William Shepherd’s - as ostensibly transcribed and commented upon by Violet Brown, the North Carolinian spinster who acts as his secretary. 

A nobody who witnesses the crushing of the Bonus Army and becomes a somebody through his best-selling novels of the Aztec Empire, along the way Shepherd establishes himself within the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo while they shelter the exiled Trotsky from Stalin’s hatchet-men.  These associations bring him up before the post-war House un-American Activities Committee.

No sensible person can really accept the red-rose-tinted character of benevolent Trotsky, as presented here and, yes, Big Bad duplicitous Daddy Yank lurks again but, really, this doesn’t detract very much at all from such a rich, well-crafted, novel. 

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn

Coney Island, baby

We were drinking black and tans in a bar beneath the J Train tracks in Williamsburg. 

‘It’s a good launch-pad for the airport,’ said the barmaid.

‘And it involves alcohol,’ I said.  ‘What can go wrong?’  I checked my watch and ordered a third round.

It wasn’t drunkenness, though, that caused to miss my homeward flight but, rather, a compound of misfortune that is  funny enough to recount now in retrospect but had me sweaty and tense and very angry at the time. 

First of all, the Air-Train wasn’t running.  It had been running when I arrived, four days previously but it certainly wasn’t now, when I stepped off just short of Jamaica dragging my suitcase behind me.  Very eventually a replacement shuttle bus arrived but the clock was already ticking.

Secondly, and most profoundly, my print-out from the airline’s website had clearly and unambiguously stated that my flight would depart from JFK’s Terminal 2.  It was more than unfortunate, then, that after I had lugged my case off onto the sidewalk and dragged it up a ramp, and the bus had pulled away and an indeterminate piece of metal that held the case and its wheels together had dropped clattering away, that Terminal 2 turned out to be altogether too empty with no passengers and barely any staff.  I managed to attract the attention of the woman on the Hertz desk away from her ‘phone long enough for her to gesture at the prominent sign that I had passed by in a fluster which announced that Terminal 2 had closed some two hours previously and which redirected misbegotten souls, such as myself, off to Terminal 3. And the clock had ticked some more.

Down ramps, up ramps, descending in an elevator, dragging the disintegrating case behind me – another piece fell off –  the clock ticked inexorably on as I began to lose my cool in the dark concrete labyrinth. 

Thirdly, and most comically, the check-in desks in Terminal 3, when I eventually arrived there, sweating heavily by now, were distinctly undermanned and the queue before them was almost entirely composed of large family groups of Hasidic Jews.  If  I’d been in a slightly better mood at this point, and in considerably less need of the rest room as those black and tans took their toll, I might’ve imagined myself to be immersed in a early-mid period Woody Allen movie.  There was a lot of shouting going on.  There were children and cases galore.  There was a great deal of confusion.  The airline staff were worrying about from one desk to another and back again, conferring over great handfuls of passports and finally, just as I reached the front of the queue, the clock ticked time and the seemingly sensible hour that I had allowed myself between subway and desk had run right out.

Too late they said.  It was too late to check my case in and nearly too late by now for the rest room.  I challenged, I queried, I pleaded, I excused myself for five blissful minutes, and came back and pointed out the very salient point about my misdirection to Terminal 2.  It could have been much worse and I might’ve struck a more obdurate person than Teri. She grudgingly admitted that the balance of the fault was more upon the airline’s side than upon mine, booked me onto another flight for the following evening, and loaded me up with vouchers for food at the airport and for cabs back into Brooklyn again there and then and out to the airport again the next day.

I stepped outside for a cigarette and called X.  ‘I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you.’

----

It really exists America.  Manhattan is really there.  Like Arthur Dent of immortal memory I had always somehow doubted it, but there it was in its immensity as X and I stood upon the slip of a beach beside the East River in the lowering dusk of the evening that I arrived.

It had become one of those embarrassing, almost shameful, admissions, like not ever having owned a Radiohead album, which provokes near-incomprehension in the metropolitan mind.  ‘You’ve never been to New York?’ I had never been to anywhere in the Americas, North or South, mainland or islands.  There were various reasons for this, mostly financial.  So it was mainly through the good offices of Facebook and the fact that I had got back in touch with X, who I had last drunk together with some twenty years before, his consequent kind offer of a berth in Brooklyn and the suggestion that I should spend the money thus saved in hotel bills upon ‘cultural enlightenment and ale’ that caused me to bite the bullet and book myself some flights.

America, of course, and New York, and most especially Manhattan, in particular, is part of the cultural patrimony of everyone upon the planet, be it through TV, or films, or books, or music.  Rather more prosaically, I had been more than usually engaged with things NYC recently on account of a making my enjoyable way through a backlog of New Yorkers.  A friend of mine, who lives just along the road, has been a subscriber for a year or more.  His wife has belatedly begun upon the backlog and, as she finished them, batch by batch, their little boy has been happily playing postman by putting them through my letterbox.  There is a great deal to be said for this, for absorbing the sense and the feel of a magazine in this way, and it’s not so very different from watching TV shows via the DVD box-set, a disc of three or four or five episodes at a sitting.  I had only ever picked up odd copies of the New Yorker before, very occasionally and not often enough to garner a real impression of it as the institution that it is. And I have to say that I am now, as the backlog begins to diminish and the political stories in the Talk of the Town begin to creep ever closer to the current, rather hooked upon it, and must, in some small way, have been absorbing an NYC sense of the world.

Having never been before, of course, a good deal of what I did in my few days there was touristic tick-boxing.  Thoroughly enjoyable but tick-boxing nonetheless, of the sort that one does anywhere so as to be able to prove to yourself and to others that you were indeed really there.  So, put briefly, there was the Staten Island Ferry, a self-consciously ghoulish glance over Grand Zero, the New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, The Top of the Rock, MoMA and the Guggenheim. 

But it was the little things too.  Being on those streets: 34^th and 42^nd, Broadway and The Bowery, 5^th Avenue and Bleeker Street, with the cabs and the cops and riding the subway uptown and downtown and walking past The Zimm’s old place on McDougal Street and resisting the urge to go have a rummage through the bins.

And the music. The guy with the grand piano playing Gershwin in Washington Square, the student jazz musicians who turned up one by one as the ensemble expanded from drum and bass to sax and trumpet and guitar, and the trio of North Carolinian musicians in Central Park.

And the bars - lots of bars - in Manhattan and in Brooklyn too, ambling around them with X, chatting to people, who were all far more polite and friendly than the average for London, and sampling the brews.  I knew there was a proper brewing scene in America but I was very pleasantly surprised at the offering of IPAs and Stouts and whatnot everywhere we went. 

As I made my way about that wonderful city I was working my through the chapters of a fantastic book.  X was at work a lot during the day so I flying solo for much of my sightseeing which didn’t bother me overmuch: I never got really lost and there’s no sense in dragging someone around the sights that they has already seen a dozen or more times.  But in such circumstances I like to have something more about me in the way of reading material than just a guide-book, if nothing else because a guide-book marks you so starkly out as a tourist.  So it was fortunate that a while before I made the trip a friend had recommended me to read Up in the Old Hotel – a collection of pieces, mostly for the New Yorker, by Joseph Mitchell.  I began upon the book on the way over across the Atlantic and then carried around with me in my man-bag on my daytime excursions about the city, taking it out at pauses in parks and cafes and bars, savouring not just the taste of the city of half a century of more ago but also the pitch-perfect style, as Mitchell roves about the Bowery and the Fulton Street Fish Market profiling itinerants, preachers, dreamers and lost city ramblers, imposters, freaks and Gypsy kings.  Bits and pieces are scattered across the web.  The full text of the piece that gives the collection its title is here.

Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River. At that time, a little while before the trading begins, the stands in the sheds are heaped high and spilling over with forty to sixty kinds of finfish and shellfish from the East Coast, the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, and half a dozen foreign countries. The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fish-mongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being, and sometimes they elate me. I wander among the stands for an hour or so.

Most fascinating of all are the profiles of Joe Gould, Professor Seagull, the man who, in a megalomaniacal fantasy which he held to for year upon year, claimed to be writing a 9 million word Oral History of the World in scrappy notebooks while bumming his way around the Village soliciting “contributions”.  Mitchell duly fell for it and his 1942 profile of Gould elevated the holy fool to minor celebrity status such that tourists would look him up and literary New Yorkers like e.e. Cummings were always ready with a few bucks.  Gould died in 1957 and it wasn’t until 1964 that Mitchell, in another piece, revealed how he had suspected and then become certain that, a few fragments apart, each of them endlessly rewritten, the magnum opus simply did not exist, had never existed beyond Gould’s imagination and bravado.

You couldn’t make the rest of it up.  After this this piece on Gould and his non-existent masterpiece, Mitchell duly went along to the New Yorker office every day for the next thirty years, and although people heard the clatter of typewriter keys behind his office door, he never again produced anything of substance in one of the ultimate, most frightening, cases of writers’ block.

----

Although it felt as if I were taking French leave – I had to text the office and inform them of the delay and could well imagine the sarcastic comments at the misfortune of being stranded in New York – that final unexpected day proved a very pleasant bonus.  X took the day off work and we rode the subway down to Coney Island.  The beaches were empty, what with it being a Tuesday, and the sun was beating down in an 86 degree heat from a near cloudless sky and you could have imagined yourself to be on a Caribbean shore.  We bought beer and fish and chips from Nathan’s and sat in the shade looking across the bay to Far Rockaway before wandering along the boardwalk, past the shuttered stalls, down to Brighton Beach for more beer in the company of the local Russians.  This time, however, I called it a draw with plenty of time to spare.