I, Ripper

“No, no, Harry, not the ore. It’s got to have a deft way of saying something A, so absurd and preposterous, that it decodes to something B, the exact opposite. When you asked Jeb about the shooting, he said, ‘Quite jolly.’ Lacking much sense of how we speak over here, you thought he meant ‘Quite jolly.’ But in his voice was that elusive tone of which I speak, nuanced, coded, subtle, a series of inflections meshed perfectly with little facial expressions such as slightly lifted left brow, slightly snarled upper lip, and a kind of trailing, dissipating rhythm, by which he communicated to me and far more to himself that he considers such action as blowing little birdies out of the sky with twelve-dram blasts, so that there’s nothing left but feathers and gristle, positively ghastly. That’s irony. That’s what this letter needs. That will make it last.”

Harry took an excellent lesson from this. “He doesn’t like hunting?” he asked incredulously.

We ignored him. He’d never get it, even if the initial impulse had been his.

“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” I said.

“Jeb, you’re halfway to a fine future. I’ll play you big in recompense, and in a bit you’ll be able to jump to a posh rag like the Times, where your gifts will make your fame, and they’ll send you all over the world and all the publishers will be beating down your door for a manuscript.”

I knew I was doomed. He had me cold. I was the birdie in the sights of his four-dram. The man was a genius.

And so, my first masterpiece. Like any piece of great writing, it has no autobiography. You cannot segmentize it and say, This came from there, and then I figured out that, and then from somewhere else that arrived, and there it was. No, no, not like that at all. It is more a process not of writing, I suppose, even less of willing, but somehow of becoming. You become what you must become.

Still, as I sat at what had become my desk in the newsroom, later that night after all the editions had been put to bed and most of the boyos had gone home or to the beer shop, I do remember odd notes coming together to form a melody, almost as if I were merely the conduit and something, some force (not God, as I don’t believe in Him and if I did, surely this is not the sort of enterprise He would willingly join), were dictating to me. For some strange reason, the word “boss” was in my mind, as Harry had used it to O’Connor, and it was not a common Britishism but more a bit of American slang, not the word, per se, but using it as a term of address. We call no one “boss,” we call the boss “sir.” Universally. So it amused me that whoever our fellow was, he’d address the world, via the Central News Agency, as “Dear Boss.” He wasn’t writing the coppers, you see, but in some sense the public, his true supervisor, as if putting on the whole show for their edification. I was conscious also of O’Connor’s dictate of irony, and I knew instinctively he was right. Our writer couldn’t be a foamer, a threatener, a bloviator, a loudmouth on a crate in Hyde Park haranguing the proletariat on its meat-eating habits. You couldn’t feel the sting of a volley of saliva when he talked. No, he’d been much too dry for that, so I used my own line from the meeting, “down on whores,” which understated by a thousand percent the carnage that he had released upon them. The word “shan’t” quite naturally appeared to me next, as I had never heard it spoken except on the lips of genteel vicars at the occasional ecumenical tea I had attended; I needed something harsh to play off the softness of “shan’t,” so I tried “cutting,” “slashing,” “whacking,” “sawing,” “hacking,” all of which did not, to my ear, work.

Then from somewhere – God’s mouth to my ear, or the devil’s lips to my brain – I came across “ripping,” which was perfect euphonically, even if wrong technically. He hadn’t ripped them, he’d cut them. But ripping had the right sound and connoted a savagery that the world would adore, even if, bent in the quarter-moon over his felled carcass, the man would in no way resemble a wild ripper, since his movements had to be focused, concentrated, driven by considerable application of disciplined force, all of it done with the knife’s sharp edge, none of it “ripped” as if by a crazy man’s churning hands, fingers all tightened to clamp strength as they tore asunder gobbets of flesh and flung them wildly. Whatever he was, he was no ripper, and perhaps the man could not have called himself a ripper, but the delicious sound of the word “ripper” trumped all those considerations. There is a poetic truth higher than fact.