Ableman As Near as I Can Get

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31416-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 234 Seiten

First published in 1962 As Near as I Can Get was Paul Ableman's follow up to his critically acclaimed debut I Hear Voices. Following Alan Peebles, a young man struggling to become a poet, As Near as I Can depicts a mid-twentieth century London of offices, pubs and lodgings. Fuelled by drink through these desperate years, the narrator charts his encounters with women and fellow artists, as he seeks to glimpse a wonder in life barely discernible beneath the routine of every day. 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

Paul Ableman (1927-2006) was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, born in Leeds and brought up in London and New York. He was the author of five novels, most famous of which was I Hear Voices, in which his writing is inspired not only by the modernist avant garde but by psychoanalytic theory. He also wrote plays and scripts for radio, television and theatre. He was chief fiction reviewer for the Spectator and the EveningStandard, and London literary correspondent for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ableman, Paul

Leseproben

The office was visually a place of sterile tedium and had a slippery floor. Piers of dove-grey filing cabinets jutted in labyrinthine profusion about the room partially isolating Mrs Longmore (spectacles and rude, frizzy, auburn hair), Mr Taper (cheerful and hunchbacked and irrevocably plebeian), Mr Copes (young and dull) and others, Mr Welsh, wearing nerves like a gaudy tie, raided us from his inner office (where several times a minute he smiled a brilliant smile) every hour or so and returned with a trophy of observed inattention or suspected inefficiency. Inside the filing cabinets were thousands of cards, each classifying a single wretched individual in terms of physical debility. Somewhere, creaking with arthritis, hobbled the venerable and affluent (implied by the ability to afford the essentially superfluous form of insurance we purveyed) subject of the stark slip of cardboard in Mrs Longmore’s bony fingers. But, for Mrs Longmore, only the pathological index was real.

The great consultant strode through the office. Eyes that could infer, from a minutely deranged pattern of ribs, a buckled lung, surveyed clerks with lofty contempt, hands that could part and suture thread-like vessels, fingers that, probing amorphous, visceral slime, could detect a minute, incipient tumour, clasped the raw, farmer’s hands of the director who, a magpie of white, silken locks and decorous, dark suit, whirred from his inner office when notified of the surgeon-knight’s arrival. Concrete. Through the bare, bleak windows flowed images of sterility, a concrete fawn in a shallow pool sprinkling superfluous rain. One day there was a child in the grass and concrete enclosure between the office blocks and we all watched its strange, unself-conscious behaviour with jolly water and cool grass half-incredulously for no one had ever before been seen in the inner court and it was tacitly accepted that no public door opened onto the forbidden space.

‘Has anyone got 147934?’ trilled Mrs Longmore sweetly, no not sweetly, roughly. She was a rough, married woman who admitted once, to my astonishment and Mr Taper’s cheerful unconcern, to being the mother of six. Six times the bloody matrix had swelled, six times the protean foetus had evolved in the generative cavity of this efficient woman and six times a slip of squirming life, propelled by heart-rending exertion and spurred on by yells of agony, had slid from between the parted thighs of this senior member of the office staff, whom I, in the delirium of youthful lust, could not think of as other than sexless.

Mrs Patty also wore glasses, plain ones too like those of Mrs Longmore, and tirelessly, sweetly, like a woman (in a Dutch interior) spinning, operated a complex, electronic machine. Egg-shaped, plump-faced, one might have said full-breasted if bosom and belly had not merged in a general upholstery of flesh beneath the limp pleats of her shapeless gown, Mrs Patty constituted no terminal on which the sparking current of desire could home. Nor did Olive, the dumpy, witless office girl, hardly even when she changed her shoes and, ponderously hoisting up an ankle, displayed pasty flesh high above the knee. Nor did the towering angular Mrs Richards.

‘But we ought to have a special correspondence clerk. I’ve been saying so for twelve years,’ grated Mrs Longmore, seeking chronically to fire Mrs Patty, who, effortlessly neutralizing her spleen, murmured, ‘Yes, yes indeed, things could be much better. Of course, they could be worse too. Perhaps there’s a good reason, but of course you’re probably right. Indeed you probably are.’ Without ceasing to supervise and nervously, but infallibly, direct the complex activities of her dexterous machine.

Into the night of light, the glare of disseminated current, at half-past five went Mrs Patty and Mrs Longmore and Mr Taper, to small, electron-blue rooms, resonant of cars and planes, to bake, to bully and vicariously to pursue balls through howling stadia. Into the dove-grey, dustless, loveless office at half-past nine shambled an area of appalled space, clad in my body, as despairingly far from evening tap time as some peering, over-venturesome swimmer from the (he suddenly knows) never-more-to-be-trodden shore.

‘If you don’t get a degree, you won’t get a good job. You’ll regret it later,’ murmured the unemphatic maternal voice lodged, with all the rest of the spoken past, ineradicably in my brain.

Offices, where paper is handled, where files and records multiply like bacilli, where paper is marked with communicative symbols and we drink tea at half-past ten and three. Offices do not produce food or clothes or cunning machines but only black marks on white paper. ‘Ours is responsible work,’ I murmured, in ironic self-encouragement. Paper must be marked while the sun, generating useful energy, shines. The sun once shone on the realm of the dinosaur, pouring energy into the luxuriant vegetation, which energy now propels Mr Welsh, seated, home in his new, sleek car. Stop, oh sun, your ceaseless benediction. It deprives Mr Welsh of exercise and pollutes the umber gloom of October.

In the fields, beyond the twinkling town, the shy fauna, mammal and reptile, repossess their ancient heritage. The last unpolluted brook gurgles down from the last unprospected mountain, quenching long-legged birds and watchful deer, mangling salmon. The last bear rears in Tibet and the seal dives to the warm, fish-rich current sweeping round the world. Plankton shimmers in the sea’s green throat and five-miles up Miss Penny Fannington glances sideways in subtle acquiescence at Your Roving Reporter standing her drinks in the aircraft’s Moon Room.

‘Yes?’ asks Mr Welsh anxiously, and then smiles, the involuntary reflex drawing back lips and crinkling eyes in the semblance of fraternal benevolence. And then, abruptly, ceases to smile.

‘I’m leaving.’

‘Leaving?’

‘At the end of the week.’

‘Leaving?’ smile. ‘Why?’

The fact is, I’ve been offered the throne of France. Er, no, while I was sitting out there just now, with Mrs Longmore grumbling and with Mr Taper (who is a dear—a gentle, ignorant, sweet-natured man whom I admire, but whom I cannot reduce speed sufficiently to accompany through life) humming a simple air about ‘your magic …’ as he stamped forms and with Mrs Patty’s slick sorter chattering on through its torrent of records and as I sought back through the Duckworth file for that sales manager’s first intimation of asthma and my unfound darling wandered forlorn through some quarter of the darkening city and the fog thickened in the court and Olive sniffed, the image of a pint of beer came into my head and I thought of a Members’ Club to which this little, sooty card will admit me where they dispense it at this hour and I rose as in a dream and came in here to quit.

Having given in my notice, I walked calmly back into the main office, aware that I was being watched, since an uninvited intrusion into the director’s lair always signified drama, and calmly, or with calm exterior, donned my greasy mack and with a single crisp ‘Good night’ for them all, walked out into industrial haze of the Thames valley.

Later that night, a mouse shuddered across the ceiling. Mike Rea thumped up the wooden stairs, muttered, complained, stamped into his neighbouring cubicle, dumped a heavy object (a machine? books?) and was silent. Then I sensed his breathing at my door and almost groaned in sudden, inexplicable revulsion. Lean and pale as a Gothic saint in the half-moonlight, large eyes reflectively scanning the canal-side tenements, green in the half-green moonlight, tapping a pensive rhythm on the startling whiteness (in an unsanitary, unshaven man) of a tooth, Mike, slack as an unstrung bow, sat sadly on my bed.

‘Well?’ (How is your life proceeding?)

‘Well?’ (How is yours?)

‘I’m nobody.’

Pale, human faces in the sunless zone.

‘It’s true, I’m nobody.’

I uttered a sort of nasal snort, intended to signify amused and confederate sympathy, and grew uncomfortable. The assertion coincided too narrowly with my own developing opinion. Mike, cheered by his admission, patted my thigh.

‘Seen Tessa?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘I saw her.’

His tame sardonic imp appropriated his features and inspected me coolly, but had nothing worthy to impart.

‘With her mother. Listen——’

The imp blew out and benign, candid Councillor Mike replaced him.

‘You haven’t got a hope, not with her.’

Mike forgot me and Tessa and strove mentally with a host of enemies, tax officials, dealers, unfaithful, undevoted bloody women, respectable apes, somebodies. He stretched out his arms in an exhaustive yawn and the garlic and rot of his incompetent digestion reached my nostrils.

‘I can do anything,’ he promised, rising lightly and corruptly as fumes. ‘Sleep beautifully.’

Out of a job, girlless, not drunk….

The next morning:

‘Where are you staying now?’

‘With Mike Rea.’

‘Uh huh.’

The fat face retained its expression of surface interest and background indifference. It was like Jock Kempton’s face, round and pudgy, but with a glistening, ambitious eye. The name was Swishki or so pronounced and I had never seen it written. Heaving mutinously, beneath the thongs of an acquired, cultured British accent,...