Frayn The Trick of It

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30409-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

He knows everything about her before they meet; more about her nine novels that she does herself. He has devoted his life to studying and teaching them and yet he is four times as clever as she is. Now, as she steps off the train in London, something about her in the flesh sets him thinking. Maybe he has a chance to resolve the one remaining mystery at the heart of things. . . Through a series of letters sent by a minor English Literature academic to his old friend in Australia, Frayn combines a vivid and moving study of obsession, with a witty and playful account of what it's like to be on the fringes of the creative process. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies and Skios. His seventeen plays range from Noises Off, recently chosen as one of the nation's three favourite plays, to Copenhagen, which won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frayn, Michael

Leseproben

Funny occasion. occasion! I mean the visitation from the subject of my studies.

First thing to report: she is .

Let us define our critical vocabulary. I mean that, were you to introduce her to your genteel but semi-literate family, or I to my semi-genteel and quarter-literate one, they would not raise an eyebrow. She is quietly spoken, slightly plumper than I expected from the photographs, almost motherly. She didn’t want to talk about books, least of all hers, and when forced to by some of my more obstreperous over-achievers, she seemed slightly perplexed, as if she had found these volumes with her name on the title-page lying on her bookshelves one day and couldn’t quite account for their presence. And what she said about them had a wonderful dullness and brownness, like the linoleum in some old-fashioned public library. She said it was important to make the reader feel at home in a book. She said she had found it was no good trying to write about characters she didn’t respect. You should allow yourself no more than one major and one minor coincidence per book. Etcetera. If the Faculty Board had heard such things on my lips I should certainly find myself looking for other employment in the coming academic year, probably as an encyclopedia salesman. But coming from her, of course, they had a most impressive air of gnarled integrity, of hard-won simplicity.

I could see that some of my more serious students, particularly my Female Foucault from Flixwich, were looking a little shaken by all this, as if Moses had held up the tablets of stone and they had nothing on them but the by-laws of the Mount Sinai National Park. But I was charmed. I quietly shelved all my plans to ask her about fire-symbolism, whether KG was really DB, etc., and asked her about her favourite authors instead, which I think was the right move, though favourite television programmes might have been better still. (If I tell you that joint on the hit parade were the Brothers Grimm, there are ten points to be won for naming me numbers one and two.) And everybody in the Faculty Dining Room afterwards was very impressed. The Bald Eagle put his head a little on one side as he chewed, and watched her silently with those impassive, predatory eyes. The good Pope John himself beamed and chuckled and raised his hand in blessing. They all knew who she was, of course, though she is disconcertingly more mobile and alive than you’d guess from still photographs. Even the women thought she was wonderful. Or at any rate this is what La Beldam Sans Merci whispered to me over the Returned Trays. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ said the Beldam, with that dreadful little grin she has, and that dreadful little flickering of the eyelids. And for once the Beldam was right. Wonderful is what she is. Like the Queen.

The Queen! Yes! That’s what she’s like! Or rather, she’s what the Queen would be like if the Queen were less like the Queen. I mean, if she didn’t talk in a funny voice, if she wrote books or taught the Romantics, like everyone else. She has that same maddening air of being quietly and unshakeably right, of being absolutely who she is, and of considering this an entirely sufficient explanation for her presence in the world. She is Queen – by the Grace of God Defender of the Fiction, Empress of Character and Sovereign of the Blessed Plot.

I mock, but only the better to express my awe. Because in our age of doubt and relativism, the survival of such a stable literary monarchy, such , must be the envy of the world. No, but it is rather surprising. Don’t you think? Did I say earlier that she was ? I see, on examining the record (Richard Dunnett, , p. 4003), that I did. ordinary was the phrase I used. Let me modify this a little. She is .

I think she is at peace with herself. (A sudden shift of authorial tone here towards the reverential, placing no doubt considerable strain on the reader’s flexibility of response.) Even in my sheltered life I have met authors before, as you know, and they seemed to me insecure creatures, childishly eager for approval and reassurance, much given to queasy philosophies of love for all mankind except, naturally, critics and fellow authors. (Well, you know who I have in mind.) So to see this simple monarch, this … this , sitting with such modest dignity amidst my students and colleagues, talking to the former about how to find a good literary agent, and to the latter about gardening and cats, touched my heart most strangely. She talks, I should say, quietly and sparingly. And she listens when other people talk. She has a certain way of looking at you while you’re talking … Well, she doesn’t blink. That’s it. It’s taken me all this time to think what it is that’s so striking about that look of hers. You talk, and she looks at you with those thoughtful eyes (hazel, if you like to know these things), and she doesn’t blink or look away, so you find yourself saying rather more than you intended. And no doubt she’s making a mental note of it all (isn’t this what writers do? – as if some kind of mental Pitman’s were squiggling across their brains), and planning to put you into her next book – but let her, let her! I can think of no happier fate than to be lured in through those ever-open doors, taken to pieces inside that-well-concealed brain, cleaned up, redesigned, made credible, given a function in some properly organized plot, and then reborn through those motherly fingers; to become ink (blue, Swan) emerging from the nib (gold, 18-carat) of her pen (black, Waterman’s); and to be laid out (on the luxurious hundred-gram Conqueror bond she always uses) beneath the eyes of all literate mankind and all eternity. You see what I mean about her being the Queen.

I suppose I did indeed talk rather a lot. Not at dinner. At dinner I sat in silence like a proud owner, watching everyone else as they first tiptoed admiringly round her, then succumbed and talked about not just gardening and cats but their childhoods and their parents. In the Common Room afterwards, though, I got her to myself, and I told her all about – well – yes – my childhood and my family. About my mother and my Auntie Annie, and Ted and June, and Griffins the newsagents. I’ve told you all about them, too, so don’t look like that – and I’ve actually taken you into Griffins, but of course you’ve forgotten. It was where I spent my childish pennies, with odious piety but touching wrongheadedness, on . You remember now? Or are you looking like that because you’re jealous? My God, this is the woman I have devoted the last twelve years of my life to! Alone together at last. Naturally I had to tell her things. Though now it occurs to me that the look on your face is not jealousy at all – it’s professional surprise that I was telling her all about mother and aunts when I should have been asking her about , not to mention the identity of DB and the possibility of spontaneous combustion in refrigerators. Yes. Well. What can I say? You’re right. But I blink when I talk and she doesn’t. If I could look straight into people’s souls then people would be teaching me and babbling to me about their tedious adolescent awakenings in one of the few remaining cities that no one has ever written about. And I should be writing about this unfortunate place, and putting it at last on the literary map.

I have to confess, though, that I went on talking even when the X-ray equipment was no longer focused on me. I mean when I was walking side by side with her under the uncertain streetlighting in the remoter parts of the campus, escorting her back to one of our grim but serviceable guest rooms at the end of this remarkable evening. By this time I was telling her – this is too shameful – about my views, so dear and familiar to you, on the mathematical representation of narrative timescale, and she was listening as intently as ever, and smiling as warmly. Smiling? you query keenly. How do I know she was smiling when we were walking shoulder to shoulder, our eyes unable to leave the dim concrete pathway ahead for fear of stumbling over something hard, or stepping into something soft? – Because I could feel the smile on my shoulder, through the sleeve of my jacket. The warmth of it, you see. I did mention her smile? Perhaps I didn’t. I was thinking about her eyes. But beneath the eyes, extending the look in them by other means, the smile. And the smile had light, of course, but also warmth. Like the sunshine that brings forth the tender buds in May. Like deep-heat treatment with ultra-short radio waves. Have you ever had it? I had it for my shoulder last year, after the window fell on it. You can’t see anything, you can’t feel anything on your skin. But there is a sense of internal well-being. It was the same sensation exactly as we walked past Low-Temperature Physics and the hockey pitches. In the same shoulder.

So that was my visitation from the Muse, my brush with the divine fire. A brief handshake at her door, another of the smiles and I was walking back to my own rooms. And in the nick of time, you murmur coldly. Any further exposure to this particular sunshine, and the patches of strange pigmentation on my prose style would have begun to spread uncontrollably. And yes, I was a little shaken, I have to confess, as I turned out of Rutherford Way into Joliot-Curie...