Ableman I Hear Voices

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ISBN: 978-0-571-31415-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life. This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006. 'The book, not excluding Lolita, which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias 'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer 'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

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

But here he suddenly shakes his head vigorously and waves his stick.

“No,” he admits, smiling a rather bitter, defeated smile, “I haven’t told you. I haven’t made it clear. Probably there’s nothing to tell, nothing that couldn’t be quite simply explained. But wait a minute. Wait a minute,” he urges although I have neither displayed, nor feel, any impatience, “I’ll tell you something. I’ll die soon—Oh, that’s all right. My heart’s doddering, my lungs are clogged—the doctor’s warned me—each bottle I kill has a stab at me and who knows when I’ll meet my match? It might be this meek-looking fellow here. No, that’s all right. I don’t mind that, although I’ve got a wife, but she’ll be all right—we’ve got a decent house in a decent neighborhood and she’ll have enough. She won’t miss me really—she’s not very affectionate at best and women don’t mourn a drunken husband—not that we haven’t been quite comfortable together in some ways—but still, as I was saying, it’s not that— dying; no, it’s more like this—I’ll have another shot if you can put up with me?”

He darts me a glance of rather heavy irony but also, I feel, of friendship, and then, not having really sought my permission, resumes:

“I’ve always thought about things, which means I’ve never felt that I understood them. Why do the papers say what they say? Why do we troop off and lead men against other batches of men? Why do we come home and sign papers and set up factories and so on? Well, I dare say a lot of people have thought similar things and some have gone on thinking them and some have given up. I’ve never given up, but whenever I think them and I seem to be reaching above them towards some sort of understanding that will make them seem more—reasonable if you understand me—bang, I think of that street corner. I’ve never got beyond it. My whole life’s been a sort of fumbling under that roof. And now I’m going to die and I wouldn’t be surprised, no I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as the pains begin to tear at my throat and I begin to dip down into the darkness, the last thought or picture I have of all the life I’ve lived is of that idiotic street corner that I can’t even place.”

He resettles his decanter in his pocket and we stand up. It is rather cool on the stone stairway and rather gloomy.

“Dreary place,” he remarks. “I think I’ll propose, now that you’re off the agenda, that we move to one of these new, cheerful places. I never do, you know, I never propose anything, though I stamp and murmur ‘hear, hear’ sometimes. Well, I must be getting up to the meeting. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comments on what I’ve been saying, have you?”

“Not really,” I confess. “I enjoyed hearing it.”

“Well, that’s something,” he retorts briskly. He gasps slightly as he sets his bulky and abused body into motion again, and then he puffs slowly off up the stairs. At the landing he turns to add something.

“It’s all right,” he adds. “What could you say, after all? Though the truth is, although I put it so badly, still I have the feeling that we got somewhere, don’t you think?”

But at this moment a burst of voices comes from the meeting and, as if he had heard his name being discreditably mentioned, he suddenly brandishes his stick and hobbles up and out of sight.

When I get home Cousin Susan asks:

“Well, how did you get on?”

“Not too badly, Susan,” I say, not very truthfully.

“Then you’re established in Arthur’s office? You’ve embarked on a joint enterprise?”

“Well, not finally,” I temporize, “there are still a good many details to be settled. As a matter of fact, a number of the directors arrived drunk and Arthur had to cancel the meeting.”

I do not get the impression that Susan is convinced by this, but she goes away dutifully to put on my egg and I go upstairs to my room and get into bed. I lie there motionlessly for a while, hoping to feel calm, but instead I feel increasingly lonely. Outside the window is the harsh glare of morning. Whippoorwills and large urban parrots are circling around a smoking chimney. Other whippoorwills and sparrows are fluttering above the street, watching the morning bustle of the city, interested only in those untidy, muttering ancients whom day brings forth with little bags of crusts.

“Another day,” cries Arthur, bursting cheerfully into my room.

“You’re on your way?”

“I’m going to the office, old son. I shall pass Harkin the weed man, dispensing weed. I pass him every morning. I think I know the way by now.”

“I should think you do, Arthur,” I agree. “You don’t have to think about it.”

“That’s right,” he admits, but on a slightly dubious note. “I can think about other things, problems that I have to face. I can keep my mind clear.”

“Of course you can.” But then an interesting point occurs to me. “Can you keep it clear at that corner by the lavatories which seems to be very old?”

“What are you going to do today?” Arthur interrupts me, moving a small condensation about.

“I thought I might feed the parrots,” I offer, knowing that, for some reasons, it pleases Arthur to think that I have made definite plans for the utilization of my time.

“There aren’t any parrots,” he retorts.

“Then I might feed the gulls,” I amend. “The azure gulls, lovely birds, unique birds, ornithologists agree—”

“No, you won’t,” he contradicts, not angrily but with a certain hard certainty in his voice. “You’ll just lie there thinking, like a blight or plague.”

The detached manner in which he speaks these words gives them a good deal of force and I find myself looking at him with surprise and even a certain reluctant admiration. But then he speaks some more and sinks at once to a lower level.

“Feed the gulls. You won’t find many gulls in this district. And if there were—hundreds of them, screaming about as if the house were a dead whale, catch you feeding them. I don’t know why I bother with you.”

And he abruptly leaves the room.

After he has gone, I lie still for quite a long time. I realize that he was right, that I have no intention of feeding the gulls, that I have really devised no plans whatsoever for the day. And yet it is not my intention to destroy the day. Very far from it. I awoke filled with determination to put it to some excellent use. I don’t think I had anything precisely in mind although, if I had been asked to express as clearly as I could the sort of thing that was forming there, I think I should have called it a collaboration. I had intended to suggest this to Arthur when he came in, but he took the opportunity to boast about some trivial achievement and assumed what can only be called an abstract virtue. I pointed this out to him and he could only reply by displaying various testimonials, one dating from the rural period that has never been verified, and one that anyone but a chamber athlete would despise. He also spoke of his single foreign tour when it was the custom of his detachment to make their way to a steamy oasis infested by parrots. Admittedly, his description of Coker, the Northern horn-man, bellowing droll Northern obscenities as the engaging parrots wiggled their brazen plumage at him, was fairly amusing, but, on another occasion, as he once inadvertently revealed, he was hard and unjust to this same Coker. He hates Coker because the man’s memory reproaches him, but he can’t resist the applause he always wins when he recounts the spectacle. Arthur knew I’d penetrated to the disreputable core of the matter and so he closed on a note of bitterness. Later he came back into the room and purposely set fire to an end of straw trailing out of my old leather bag. He extinguished this in time but only to attempt to kindle a more intellectual blaze by remarking, in an apparently casual manner, making a show of directing his attention towards the remarkable Mrs. Groggins who was streaming her beauty down the street, “I can probably do twenty things that you can’t.” Naturally I didn’t challenge this, but Arthur could not resist adding, “Just one example—I can catch parrots.” I did smile faintly then, not that I found it really amusing, and Arthur, perhaps feeling slightly ashamed of himself, modified his attitude a little. He came and stood beside me for a moment and then, on his way out, rather casually, but with kind intent, said, “Never mind, I’ll bring you a few plumes.” And then I heard the particular sounds of his departure and the cries of the gulls, which have screamed round these rocks for untold ages, rising to a shriller note as he drove wildly out amongst them. And then the note of the gulls subsided again.

And now I lie quietly, gazing without interest at a point near the doorway. Nothing occurs to me. It is quiet in the house, It will remain quiet unless someone shakes the house. Sometimes they rebuild these houses or parts of them. Sometimes they redirect the whole line, so that if you stand at special sighting points, you can visualize later projects. An acquaintance of Groggins was persecuted like this. He protested, but his protest was used to make bullets. He said that it would be better to tear down the lot. He drew a graphic picture of the scene then, when pillars, rubble, charred frames and intimate debris made a playground for rats....