Doctor Criminale (5 page)

Then suddenly there was sharp morning light, and I was waking. This is not something I ever do lightly, but it seemed more difficult than usual on this occasion. I was, I found, in a small and
ill-curtained bedroom, below the windows of which I could hear some people talking loudly in Bengali. While I tried to take this in, some men in metal helmets passed by the window swinging on a
long steel girder and gave me a friendly wave. For a while, I hid my head below the duvet and tried to do some quick orientation. Kidnap, hostage-taking and sending young men into prostitution are
uncommon in London, but not impossible. My throat was dehydrated. My stomach was knotted. I was buck-naked and my clothes had disappeared. Then the bedroom door opened, and I lifted the covers
and peered out to find out who were my captors. There, dressed in an ‘Aloha!’ tee-shirt and cut-off jeans, stood Ros. The moment I saw her, I realized she had not been dressed like this
all night.

She came over, sat on the bed, felt my pulse. She carried a portaphone and a cup of coffee: now she spoke into the one while I drank from the other. When the coffee had opened up my vocal cords,
I asked for some bearings, temporal and geographical. It was late, said Ros, bloody late. And I was in her small but perfect terrace house, somewhere east of Bishopsgate, in the Bangladeshi garment
district, and close to Liverpool Street station. The Bengali voices were discussing the going rate for distressed leather coats; it was Liverpool Street railway station that the men on the girder
were reconstructing, or possibly deconstructing. My underwear and other clothing had been lost the night before in some friendly struggle, but Ros offered to go and find it. While she was away, I
grabbed her portaphone and called my Serious Sunday to say that, due to an extraordinary chapter of accidents over which I had no control, I had no Booker copy. My editor explained that this
mattered rather less than it might have, since they likewise had no newspaper left to put it in.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said to Ros when she came back with my knickers, ‘My bloody newspaper’s folded, down the chute, gone bust.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Ros. ‘How can it be brilliant?’ I asked, ‘Here I am, twenty-six, overhung . . .’ ‘You’re boasting,’ she said.
‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘I’m finished. Twenty-six and redundant. You’re looking at a post-Thatcherite cripple.’ ‘So what’s new?’ asked Ros,
‘You knew you’d picked a high-risk profession.’ ‘Right, and how am I supposed to pay my rent?’ I asked, ‘They say I probably won’t even get last
month’s paycheque.’ ‘Stay here if you like,’ said Ros, ‘It’s brilliant.’ ‘Do stop saying everything’s brilliant,’ I said,
‘Nothing’s brilliant. I’ve come to the end of a great career.’ ‘Of course it’s brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘Now you can come and work for me.’

I looked at her. ‘Work for you how?’ I asked. ‘My company, Nada Productions, I run it with my big friend Lavinia, is doing this huge arts feature for Eldorado
Television,’ said Ros, ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘We need someone to research and present it,’ she said. ‘Oh
no,’ I said. ‘You’re just the person: educated, literary, nice-looking.’ ‘I’m not, not after last night.’ ‘Especially after last night,’ said
Ros. I stared at her again, thinking hard. ‘Which bit of last night?’ ‘Both bits of last night,’ said Ros, ‘The bit on the box and the bit in the sack.’
‘You said I was worse than Howard Jacobson,’ I said. ‘Oh, you were,’ said Ros. ‘But Howard’s doing something else. Don’t worry, Francis. You got these
really great reviews.’

She pushed over the morning papers at me; I picked up the
Independent
first, being one of those people who always does. ‘Biter bit,’ said the headline, and the piece began:
‘The only thing that will save last night’s Booker television coverage from a justified total oblivion was the sight of one of Britain’s most bumptious journalists, the ineffable
Francis Jay . . .’ ‘You call this a good review? It’s terrible,’ I said. ‘It’s a mention,’ said Ros, ‘I told you, you were memorable. It means
you’re a television personality.’ I knew a person of sense, a man of reason, would have called a halt at this point, and I did try. ‘No, no more television,’ I said,
‘I’ve learned all about myself. I’m really a verbal person, not a visual person.’ ‘Oh come on, I read your column,’ said Ros, ‘It’s pretentious crap,
any kid could write it. No, the moment I got you in front of that camera I knew you could do it for a living.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘What, live?’ asked Ros, ‘I’m not surprised, after what you swilled down last night at the Groucho. Never mind, it will look
better after breakfast.’ ‘I don’t want breakfast,’ I said. ‘There’s something you’d rather do instead of breakfast?’ asked Ros. I looked at her; she
looked frankly at me. ‘You ought to be at work,’ I said. ‘I told you, I’m an independent,’ said Ros, ‘That means I do it my way. So why don’t we do it my
way?’ So we did, in fact, do it her way, which was quite an athletic and unusual way. And that, as it happens (and that is more or less how it happened), is how I came to spend the next
months of my chaotic young life wandering the world in pursuit of Doctor Bazlo Criminale.

Now to this day, this very day, I have no very clear idea of why – in those difficult weeks after the Booker, when my whole journalistic career collapsed, and I housesat
(and a good deal more) for Ros – my fate and fortunes, life and future, became so inextricably involved with those of Doctor Bazlo Criminale. I had heard of Criminale, naturally; who has not?
In the last few years his name has shown up everywhere. One week they’re profiling him in
Vanity Fair
, the week after in
Viz
and
Marie-Claire
. But I knew him the way most
of us know of those big public figures who raise our interest, maybe our hackles – through the interface of print, that perfect technology for letting us keep company with those whose lives
or actions make us curious but whose faces we have no wish to see, whose destinies we have no desire to share.

In short, Criminale was the text, and I was the decoder. He was an author, and I was a reader. Now I belong, as I’ve already said, to the age of the Death of the Author. According to the
rules of my excellent education, writers don’t write; they are written, by language, by the world outside, but above all by us, the sharp-eyed readers. The word Criminale, the sign Criminale,
the signature on the spine Criminale – that was more than enough for me. I had him there, a text, and had no wish to go further with him, no intention of doing so. So, I repeat, just how
did
I become so involved – so ridiculously and inextricably involved – with Doctor Bazlo Criminale?

There was certainly nothing in the ordinary logic of things likely to bring us together. He was a great international figure, the man known as the philosopher for our times, the Lukacs of the
Nineties; I was an out-of-work hack from the provinces. He was one of the superpowers of contemporary thought; I was a pygmy from Patagonia. He was the keynote speaker; I was the footnote or
appendix. Seemingly no great congress of world writers, no international meeting of intellectuals devoted to whatever it might be (world peace, human rights, the survival of the ecosphere, the
future of photography), no high-level diplomatic reception to celebrate some new treaty of cultural friendship and co-operation, was complete without the presence of Criminale; I of course was
never invited. Here was a man who measured out his life in summit conferences, ministerial receptions, congress programmes, Concorde take-off times; my main travelling adventures were attempts to
get to work on the decrepit Northern Line. While he travelled the world in the best interests of modern thought, staying at grand hotels – the Villa d’Este in northern Italy,
Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz – of such splendour that even the chambermaids had been finished in Switzerland and the desk clerks had degrees from the Sorbonne, my idea of
luxury was a bottle of aftershave for Christmas. No, there seemed little or nothing that could possibly link together the lives of Bazlo Criminale and myself.

Even so, over the next few days, as I began to research the man for the one-hour programme in the arts documentary series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’ that Nada
Productions – the small independent company that Ros ran with, as she put it, ‘my big friend Lavinia’ – was offering to Eldorado Television, I naturally came to know him
better. These were not easy days, I assure you. No cheque came from my collapsed newspaper. There was no word of compassion, never mind compensation, from the Official Receiver who had so kindly
taken over its troubled affairs. Luckily I had Ros’s offer of bed and board – though the board was, it became very apparent, completely dependent on the bed. Each night Ros would claim
her rental in the great gymnasium of her bedroom, where her experiments in revisionist gender-pairing and new theories of orgasm proved remarkably demanding. Ros was one of those people who believe
that the outer parameters of sex have still not been entirely discovered. Each morning she would rise refreshed, to water the houseplants, feed the armadillo, and set off, bright as a new BMW, for
Soho and the small one-room offices of Nada Productions.

And each day, a little more weary from what had so refreshed her, I sat down in the country kitchen of the town house in the Bangladeshi district behind Liverpool Street station to set to work
on my new career: reading and noting, sifting and filing, computing and scrolling, trying to find my way around and into the complicated and mythical figure of Bazlo Criminale. Each evening, fresh
and bracing as an arctic storm, Ros would return, bearing yet more books and journals, photos and clippings, files and faxes, by or about or otherwise pertaining to our subject. Next we would
consume the oven-ready vegetarian low-cholesterol pastas I had slipped out to buy during the afternoon, and then retire to the upstairs laboratory for yet more advanced physical research.

Then each next day I would get up, feeling a little less whole than before, and return to my other duty, the probing and pushing and plotting and planning that took me just a little closer to
the mysterious world of Bazlo Criminale. Small wonder that before long I began to feel like one of those nameless non-heroes that live in Samuel Beckett’s novels – a hermit of thought,
a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn and lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been
squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. And so it went on, day after day for a week or two or three. There was myself, there was Ros, and there was the paper figure of Doctor Criminale.

Now if you read at all – and of course you must do, or you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place – you too have probably heard of Criminale. For if you read, he writes;
oh, how he writes, or has written. In fact ‘writing’ seems far too small a word to describe the output of forty years that has spurted from his pen, too petty by far to define the
prodigious mental energy, the overwhelming intellectual ambition, that had kept him in endless creation, far too simple a term to denote the output of works that stand stacked in the bookstores
from Beijing to Berkeley, to the point where he must surely soon be due his own Dewey Decimal classification. Nothing reduced his output. No matter how far he travelled, how often he lectured, how
many congresses he attended, he wrote, and was never silenced. Stories tell us that since he was seventeen he usually produced a poem a day, and probably a journalistic article too. And since then,
just as he had seemed to visit every country, so he appeared to have visited every literary form: the novel and the philosophical treatise, the play and the travel essay, the epic poem and the
economic tract. And if this were not enough, his photographic studies of the late modern nude are acknowledged everywhere (see the recent exhibition in Dresden, with Susan Sontag writing the
exhibition catalogue). We are talking here about an all-round man.

So the theatre-goers among you will doubtless know his great historical drama
The Women Behind Martin Luther
, which is generally compared with Brecht, and not generally to Brecht’s
advantage. And what serious reader hasn’t read, and probably wept a tear or two over,
Homeless: A Tale of the Modern Age
, that small but perfect novella that Graham Greene once named
as the finest single work of the second half of the twentieth century? Biography-buffs will know his great three-volume life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (
Goethe: The German Shakespeare
?),
which not only restores to us the indivisible wholeness of the man but proves beyond doubt that the German Reich could never have existed for a minute without him. Others will remember his
extraordinary work of economic theory,
Is Money Necessary
?, which had so much impact in Soviet Russia, and his summative study
The Psycho-Pathology of the Postmodern Masses
, favourite
reading of social psychologists and police chiefs everywhere. Add to that those vast illustrated tomes on Graeco-Roman civilization so weighty they must have cracked in two the Manhattan coffee
tables they were doubtless intended for, and the small paperback works on Marxist philosophy whose tattered covers once filled the bookstore windows in Leningrad and Moscow and were awarded as
swimming prizes at Communist summer schools worldwide, and you already have a polymath. Criminale didn’t simply write in every literary form; he seemed to appeal to every political
culture.

All this I expect you know very well. But, believe me, this is only the beginning of the man called Bazlo Criminale. Oh, you may have sat in the stalls and enjoyed the epic spectacle of
The
Women Behind Luther
, or wept on your couch or your poolside recliner over the sweet perfection of
Homeless
. But have you read – and when I say read, I mean
really
read
– his remarkable critique of phenomenology? His startling and courageous refutation of Marx’s techno-centrism? His audacious challenge to Nietzsche on modernity? His classic dispute
with Adorno about the interpretation of history? The bitter quarrel with Heidegger over irony (which Criminale had much more of, and won)? You haven’t? Well, I have. For Criminale was not
simply a writer. Unlike most writers, he thought as well.