Old Acquaintance (2 page)

From our vantage today, just as many years have passed since Stacton’s untimely death as he enjoyed of life. It is a moment, surely, for a reappraisal that is worthy of the size, scope and attainment of his work. I asked the American novelist, poet and translator David Slavitt – an avowed admirer of Stacton’s – how he would evaluate the legacy, and he wrote to me with the following:

Richard T. Kelly

Editor, Faber Finds

April 2014

This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

CHARLIE
was having one of his serendipity days. Something was going to turn up. No matter how many times that feeling was disappointed, he always believed it to be reliable. Such a belief is part, after all, of the serendipity. So he felt perfectly at ease to play his favorite games. A lonely child, he had a good many of these; a lonely man, he went right on playing them. For instance, which century are we in this morning? Dawn had suggested the late 1820’s, but as the sun came up, he was reminded of the British Empire, which meant Queen Victoria, Kaiser Bill, and the Voortrekkers, though the hotel where he was staying evoked E. Berry Wall, which meant 1910. However, the British Empire suggested Ceylon, one of his favorite far places, and that in turn suggested serendipity. Distinctly, therefore, something was going to turn up.

He even knew what. Lotte was going to turn up. The Directors said so, and the Casino had been delighted to say so. Nothing could have pleased him more. He was always pleased when she turned up. What he didn’t know, was when. She was an unpredictable woman.

During the afternoon (Prinz Eugen, Ludwigsburg, 1788, to judge by the lighting, or was that Karl August’s period? He couldn’t remember. Karl August lived so damned long), he went downstairs to his favorite roost, on the back terrace,
and since Paul was off playing golf, took up still another one of his games, the way an Admiral takes up his needlepoint, between battles.

This game was bits and pieces of novels he had no intention of writing, but would have enjoyed to read, social comedies and lost classics mostly; though when he was in a savage mood, understanding women’s novels were always fun. There was that American classic,
The
Sun
Has
Rays,
for instance, very sensitive,
The
Sun
Has
Rays,
very understanding, a love story (it unbares the secrets of a woman’s heart) with heterosexual undertones, set in Wisconsin. The authoress wore tennis shoes and was the intellectual of her community. Her name was Olivia Higgens Pratt.

“Murder story, hell!” said Charlie, to an imaginary but hostile critic, “it’s straight autobiography. You only have to look at the woman to know that.”

Reluctantly he put Olivia Higgens Pratt back into the toy box. They were old friends, Olivia and he, but just for now she wouldn’t do. For Mondorf, which was where he was now, Turgenev seemed best, and not the best Turgenev, either.

Very well then, Turgenev.

Charlie, sitting in the middle of his hypothetical novel, all by himself, not the sort of novel he had made a small fortune baking over and over again, with less and less yeast, in a constantly cooler oven, but the sort of novel he did feel at home in, was quite content. He even knew how this particular novel began:

Lotte didn’t know exactly where she was, except that she was in a car, driving through it fast. What she enjoyed was that nobody else knew exactly where she was, either. She did that sometimes: she couldn’t bear to be alone for longer than the safe light of an afternoon, but when she got thoroughly fed up with her accompanist, her hairdresser, Miss Campendonck, particularly Miss Campendonck, and, in this case, Unne, she jumped into a car and went on ahead of them, secure that before she had the chance to get into trouble they would catch up with her.

That’s what she’d done this time; Miss Campendonck had been out. Unne had gone shopping. The hairdresser was having her hair done, and her accompanist was in Amsterdam. So Lotte had left a note in the sitting room, gone down to the garage, taken out the Alfa Romeo, and left Paris with one hand on the horn. The car made good time through the landscape of Limbo, and she liked Limbo in the daytime. In Limbo you can almost remember who you are.

That town she had just left behind must be Rheims, so if she turned right, she would be on the Luxembourg road, with nothing to worry about until Saturday. She didn’t stop, of course. In her world one visited only fixed stars and contiguous constellations. Between them she never stopped, for
in interstellar space it is necessary to use the overdrive, which makes stopping extremely difficult, unless one has a wreck or runs out of fuel. However, the view as one travels is impressive, and helps to pass the time. She never tired of it.

As she drove, one luxury opened out into another. On the left the fields were green plush. On the right the fields were green plush. Directly overhead, the sky was an expensive blue. If one lives in the country, one has to work it one way or another. But if one is merely passing through it, there it is, complete, an expensive artifact. Over stone walls, the flowering trees had all been made for the Russian royal family, by Fabergé. They made her feel like a rich child.

Here and there across the landscape it had rained recently, so that from an air reeking of humus she passed in and out of cool empty air which smelled of diamonds, as though above her the string had broken on an enormous lavaliere. Several chalcedony cows and a jade horse whizzed by. It is very rich, that part of France. All the cabbages have banknotes under them, instead of babies.

A few miles farther on, she stopped for an excellent lunch, an omelette and a salad, nothing more, at a gingerbread inn. Her French was fluent, though if you listened you could just make out the subterranean rumble of the German thirty years down. But it is harder to gouge a German than an American, so the omelette was well cooked, the service good, and the bill reasonable.

Since she was an American citizen, she saw no reason why she should not behave in an American way. She turned the radio on to Radio Luxembourg and let the jazz blare over her, cleansing the countryside by the latest method, the electronic agitation of molecules, as she pressed her way up to seventy with a neatly shod determined foot. She could hear birds singing in the nearest bushes, despite the speed. They were clockwork, of course, like everything else in the world,
but the workmanship was impeccable and the sound remarkably like that of a music box, the kind whose roll is plucked by jeweled butterflies.

So she sang herself. The wind ruffled her hair, and smoothed back the flesh against her cheeks, rippling along the soft golden down very pleasantly. On her left hand was a square zircon the size of a postage stamp. On her right, only freckles. Her hands looked the oldest part of her, but since they were capable hands, she didn’t mind that. She was grateful to them. They had seen her through a lot.

“Why don’t I do this more often?” she wondered.

But as the shadows began to grow longer, the cows in the meadows to run down, the machinery of the moving trees to rust, and the sky to shade off toward heliotrope, she began to get uneasy. She always did at dusk. It is that time of day when the streets are empty, a newspaper rustles over the cobbles, and the first lights look far too dim.

The border, when she reached it, depressed her. It is the symbol of our age, the impassable border, and that between France and Mondorf is very like the one the refugee sees, with nothing on one side, nothing on the other, and a black and white striped pole in between. Even an American feels a little nervous at a border. On the other side, you accelerate with relief, as though you had just managed to squeeze through an only exit much too small for you, with the devil right behind.

But ten minutes later she was in Mondorf, alone—it would be nice some day to be met without being put to the stratagem of sending someone on ahead to do so—but still, there. Now I am safe again, she thought. Now everybody will recognize me, and so I can hide from myself again.

A refugee from what?

C
HARLIE
was in the bathtub, feeling pleased with himself, since he was not conscious of himself at all. He could not bear to go anywhere alone, so the bathtub was the one place where he could indulge the luxury of being by himself. One of his firmest rules, with people he knew perfectly well didn’t give a damn about him, was, “No matter how much you may love me, you do not come into the bathroom while I am there.”

Perhaps they loved him very much, at that, for they never did. Not even his first wife had dared to do that, and as for his other wives, they had had bathrooms of their own.

He had been there about half an hour and had no desire to move. He was playing one of his favorite games, one he had been playing now for forty-five years.

The tub was deep, the water was two-thirds of the way up the sides, but even so, Charlie’s folded legs stuck out. The curve of the thigh and the bulge of the calf, as he bent the legs outward, formed two large hills, almost identical, on either side of a channel. The curls of hair along them stood in for foliage. The scene was Tahiti in an eighteenth-century engraving, or the islands off Cochin China. The summit of the knees was about two thousand feet. In the distance (he liked symmetry) the chromium outlet valve was like a pale moon, whose reflection glimmered on the water. He made little waves. Longboats put out from shore, like La Pérouse looking for something,
Treasure
Island,
or a novel by Paul de Kock. In the foreground, smack in the path of the moonlight,
lay Penis Rock, which was not a goal but a channel marker of some kind. Its scrotum made a little beach. Sometimes the longboats came ashore to gather turtle eggs from the sand, birds’ eggs from the dome of the rock itself. It was a protected area, a natural game refuge, because it was so inaccessible. The natives never visited it. But one night the longboat came alongside, shipped oars, and some of its sailors had been the first white men ever to set foot there.

Charlie laughed at himself, felt faintly embarrassed, and submerged, to play his other game, which was submarine. He lay underwater and blew out through his snorkel. When he surfaced again, the knee cliffs were bathed in moonlight, the rock was so low in the water, and so ghostly, that it was hard to believe that anyone had ever set foot on it at all.

The longboats now lay in the cove of his left knee, where the water lapped with a soft,
mezzotinto
sound.

The game amused him. In fact, by now he even knew the names, or the faces, anyhow, of the people in the longboat. The second lieutenant he liked particularly. But the stern old party at the tiller really shouldn’t have been Admiral Bligh:

That was called a clerihew. We get both our suits and our nonsense from England. Whenever Admiral Bligh looked a little too much like his father, Charlie submerged. When he came up the scene was more peaceful. La Pérouse was back again, but the night being chill, he reached up and poured in more hot water.

The phone rang.

Charlie, like most tall men, and he was six-two, which made him attractive to taller women, damn it, had an imagination which, like Gulliver, was always wading ashore at Lilliput with the whole Blefescu fleet behind him. Handing it over, he got up and answered the phone.

It was just Paul to say he’d been detained. He was using his furry moth-wing voice. Charlie hung up and went back to the bathtub. The Pacific is a large ocean. At the moment it looked empty and cold. A longboat floated upside down on the water. Charlie rescued the soap, released the drain and smiled at himself in the shaving mirror.

Among his private maps, of which he had a good many, devoted to such subjects as the exact location of all lavatories in the principal cities of Europe, in New York, and in Beverly Hills (he had done time there once, too), for he had a small bladder, was a special chart marking those hotels whose bathroom mirrors were flatteringly lit. In
Michelin,
he would have given this one three stars.

These people are enchanting, no doubt, and we are very lucky to be able to afford them, but at fifty-odd an hour to oneself is well worth the hoarding.

So Charlie dressed, went downstairs, wondered when Lotte would turn up, wondered if she would be surprised to see him, knew at least that she would be pleased, and hoarded it.