Neveryona (62 page)

So there.

But to defend myself too heatedly is, I fear, to suggest there may be reason for your attack. There isn’t. And the truth is, we had sampled just a bit of the hash that afternoon over hard bread, apples, and yak butter – before I retired into my chilly tent to write the piece as we’d discussed it.

It was a very good hash, too.

The only thought I ever really gave it, once it hurried off into the snow under the flap of Leslie’s red student knapsack, was whether or not she might take offense at my faint chidings in the article of her feminist sympathies. She already considers me the most depraved of racist Orientalists. (Probably right, too. I’ve found that blacks such as Leslie have a sense of these things. Goes along with their natural ability to sing and dance.) She didn’t have time to read it before she and her dark-eyed companion left. What we
had
discussed, of course, was how she would get the thing typed up, how she would
of course
get a copy of said typescript back to me for checking, to correct both the idiocies that invariably creep into any such transcription process as well as the inaccuracies I was bound to make under the twin pressures of Leslie’s entreaty and Yavus’s dope. (‘Kermi, I need it
now
. This
evening
. I won’t be here after six o’clock tomorrow morning!’) Of course I never saw it again. As I said, your letter was the first I’d heard of it in over two years.

I tell you.
I
know Ventris was an architect.

Believe me, so does Leslie. She could have changed it.

But it would be just like her, on reading my gentle joke anent her politics, to leave in both the joke
and
my little slips of the pen, the latter as a kind of comeuppance for the former, and with, no doubt, the same self-satisfied smile I had when I wrote it. (If she had cut out the jokes. I
wouldn’t
have minded, really … ) Well, perhaps my comments
were
over the mark. I know she takes such things seriously. More to the point, when she has talked seriously to me about them, she has been able from time to time to make me take them almost
as
seriously. Thus it is the one part of the whole enterprise I’ve actually been able to feel guilty about all this time. But such lingering guilt as mine. I know, suggests its origins were there well before Leslie, with Yavus trailing, came up that snowy slope.

All this, of course, is in the realm of speculation – which is to say I know Leslie well enough to speculate on it. What absolutely baffles me, however: What is Nevèrÿon? What is Grafton Books? (Hopefully a more
recherché
line out of some small North English university press. But I doubt it.) And who is this Delany? Why must we angle our correspondence through him? Iraq is bad enough! Leslie used to be enamored of a bizarre species of anti-literature (more generously called ‘paraliterature’ in the Pop. Cult, journals where some of her more eccentric offerings have appeared), published under gaudy paper covers – ‘scientifiction’ or some such. She would sit around the top floor of our student house, in jeans with frayed knees, and a foul sweatshirt, reading the stuff for hours, even writing reviews of it for benighted mimeographed publications its readers seemed to put out all over what I first thought limited to the civilized world but which, after I had seen a bit more, I soon realized included many places fairly uncivilized as well. It sounds
like she’s gotten me involved, somehow, in this ‘SF,’ as she used to call it. (She actually would try to get me to
read
the stuff!) If that’s what she
has
gotten me involved with, I shall never be able to set boot in the mahogany-panelled halls of the Spade and Brush Club again. (Professor Loaffer will guffaw and bang me on the shoulder, and invite me for a pint, and ask rude questions about flying saucers until I have to say something rude in retort. Professor Cordovan, on the other hand, will not say anything at
all
!) Well, shell certainly have paid me back tenfold if that, indeed, is what she’s done with it!

She said ‘general readership.’ I thought she at
least
meant something on the order of
The Atlantic, Harpers
– a sketch for a more extensive coverage in, say,
Scientific American.

I
am
appalled … !

I add these last paragraphs while the scar-faced gentleman in the very dusty jelabba, who sits stoically by the dirty white canvas tent in a strip of shade that does not quite extend to his brown, cracked toes, drinks slowly and steadily from a half-gallon canteen of Instant Country Time Lemonade, waiting for the evening to grow cool enough to resume his journey, taking with him the excavation team’s several letters (including this one, soon as I finish it), toward … is there
really
such a thing as civilization?

And, no, he’s not sure of the date either.

One of the things he brought, however, was a note from Abdullah Obtwana. Did you ever meet him? A lanky, large-handed, ebony-lipped youth – yes, another of Leslie’s acquisitions. His mother, who made a micro-fortune at some dubious profession in Nairobi, sent him to one or another of our insistently liberal universities on the Southern Rim to take a pre-med course. After three
terms, his advisers asked him if he wouldn’t be happier moving to the agricultural college – and why didn’t he take remedial English on the side? Abdullah was amenable enough, but in the resultant student brouhaha, he came under Leslie’s … tutelage? More Brie. More sherry. (Was
that
the reception where I met you? You would remember, because Abdullah wore the adidas then – and raspberry red pants!) More luminous smiles – from a broad-cheeked face dark as the tenebricose pit. At any rate, through the desert grapevine (despite its wrinkled, desiccated fruits, its pale, tepid wines), news of my presence has reached him, less than a hundred miles away. He says he is coming to see us, here at the excavation site. He says he remembers our three evenings together with ‘an infinitude of pleasure.’ Don’t you find Africans delightfully formal? At the end of
two
of those evenings, neither one of us could stand! He’s bringing along a friend – from the details,
not
Leslie. The friend is male and probably young, since ‘he looks rather very good riding a camel.’ Rather very good indeed. I say! There will be pleasantry forthcoming in a day or ten, when Abdullah and friend ride up through the scrub – someone with whom to talk about my most recent discoveries and complain to of Leslie’s possible treacheries. Unless, of course, this tooth … but I dare not speculate!

All right, then. I’ll speculate: one of the books I am never without is my thin, green India-paper edition of Layard’s
Memoirs
. Perhaps you, Hoequist, can say what character-masochism makes me return again and again to this account from 1840:

I had slept little, as I was suffering greatly … The sheikh declared that there was a skillful dentist in the encampment, and as the pain was almost unbearable, I made up my mind to put myself in his hands rather than endure it any longer. He was accordingly sent for. He was a tall, muscular Arab. His instruments consisted of a short
knife or razor, and a kind of awl. He bade me sit on the ground, and then took my head firmly between his knees. After cutting away at the gums he applied the awl to the root of the tooth, and, striking the other end with all his might, expected to see the tooth fly into the air. The awl slipped and made a severe wound in my palate. He insisted upon a second trial, declaring that he could not but succeed. But the only result was that he broke off a large piece of tooth, and I had suffered sufficient agony to decline a third experiment …

Enough of these McTeaguean horrors! (Really, I must go borrow Wellman’s
Doughty
to drive such daymares off.) I close now – indeed, I have to if I want this letter to go out this week, as the barefoot Berber gentleman has just upended his canteen over the ground and shaken loose not one drop of Country Time for the thirsting sands.

My best regards,
(signed:) S. L. Kermit

New Haven
August 1981

Dear Kermit,

Your letter, despite several forwardings, still reached here before I did. And when I did see it, my first response was to put it into a box, where it might conceivably survive the moving that was going on.

Yes, I am at Yale, though not many are aware of it. I cultivate unobtrusiveness. That, and the ability to read upside-down print, will take you a considerable distance.

I find your description of my letter’s condition quite believable. A friend of mine spent some time recently doing excavation in Turkey, and attempts to get communication established have convinced me that the best thing to do is stitch one’s correspondence on some fairly tough animal hide.

Indeed, we may well have met somewhere, likely at one of the Ivy conferences – ‘The Hero in Classical Literature,’ something like that. Or one of those where salted peanuts substitutes for Brie, due to budget problems. That was CCNY, I think.

Pardon the hiatus. Due to the unsettled nature of things, I must periodically leap up to answer the phone, so that I can tell increasingly insistent callers that no, he’s not here, and, what’s more, I never heard of him. There are also occasional trips to the hallway to help bring in another piece of furniture. And someone is celebrating something on the floor below, and if I don’t have some champagne, it will be a grave offense.

So it is now tomorrow. Or rather, up there is yesterday.

I have looked over my previous letter and noted your comments on the situation in which the Appendix was written, and I am inclined to think that my tone was a bit harsher than was warranted. (I think maybe I’d just gone through a set of oral exams – no, it was something to do with thesis topics.) I must have been in the mood for some innocent’s flesh.

I retract my comment on the ‘neolithic revolution’; I simply wanted to point out that you could make your own statement a stronger one.

I reaffirm, however, my stand on ‘proto-’ vs ‘archaic’ It is
not
simply a preference in terms – not when discussing philology, which you were. And speaking of old Latin puns, how about
mea mater mala sus est
? It translates:

‘My mother is an evil pig,’ and ‘Come, mother, the pig is eating the apple.’ Which reminds me: it
was
CUNY that had the awful hors d’oeuvres. I was wincing, both at the taste and at their linguistic punblication (I assure you, that was an unintentional typo!)
CUNYforms.

All right, so maybe there was interchange between Trojans and Greeks. Kate from the Classics Department is even willing to argue that the Trojans spoke a Greek dialect. Then again, this would not be Kate’s only peculiarity. If you could hear some of her off-the-cuff etymologies …

The fact that the phrase ‘neolithic palaces’ does exist does not justify perpetuating the silliness. No way. In fact, old Threadneedle turned utterly apoplectic when he saw that. I didn’t realize emeritus professors had that much steam. I wouldn’t have shown it to him if I’d suspected what he’d do. The worst part is not his anger, which is sometimes almost comic in its Continental excesses; he has unfortunately seized on Leslie’s name and is convinced that George Steiner has gone off and had an illegitimate daughter somewhere, and now wants to meet her.

Ms Steiner has done nothing to deserve this.

Thinking back, I may well have met her, and at a science fiction convention, of all places. (‘Scientifiction’? My
dear
colleague, one would think you’d been keeping company with C. S. Lewis; I am told he’s the last one who used the term consistently. They just call it
ess-eff
now.) Regrettably, your description of her doesn’t narrow the field enough. I met several very bright women of that physical type. In fact, I met several men of similar build and intellect, some of whom were named Leslie. Does she by any chance know Greek folk songs? In that case, I
do
remember her. She was the only other person who knew ‘O, Pnevmatikos.’ We were singing it while walking
around Fancuil Hall, which would have made it Noreascon 1.

I’m sorry, I digress, and on a path which is probably opaque to you. I’m quite surprised that news of publication hadn’t reached you. Granted, you’ve been well off the normal paths, but science fiction fans have a way of leaking in everywhere; it seems odd that Ms Steiner herself didn’t drop you a line. I’ll keep an eye out for her, if for no other reason than to tell her so; as you point out, we’re more likely to have met than not.

Hiatus again. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.

It is now considerably later, and I am considerably hungrier. A raid is being organized to find the most decadent food in the vicinity, and I intend to be in on it.

Until I hear from you again, I remain

Yours sincerely,
(signed:) Charles Hoequist, Jr

Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation. Years pass; and, doing much the same as they did when younger, older writers take an object now known to be, if not exactly private, certainly more idiosyncratic, individual to individual, than an empiricist philosophical tradition is comfortable with and perform on it an action now known to involve so many communal facts, from generic conventions and ideological reductions to just plain help, that the Romantic notion of individual artistic creation’ becomes hugely shaky – if it has not, indeed, crumbled. The older writers have not necessarily learned ‘craft’ any better than the younger; nor have they even – necessarily – learned more of the language itself. They simply have more interesting critical material in which to observe play.