The Last Samurai

I came into the office one day in June 1986 to find everyone in a state of nervous excitement. An acquisitor had snapped up the firm and had assured everyone that it would remain an autonomous imprint. This sinister announcement was taken to mean that everyone would soon be redundant.

The overtaker was a big American company, and it published many writers admired in the office. There was to be a big party to celebrate the merger in a few weeks’ time.

Emma had got me my job and my work permit & she now got me an invitation to this party.

Now not only did the new firm publish many American writers admired in the office but it also published Liberace, and one of the reasons getting me invited was a favour, one of the reasons people were excited, one of the reasons I did not want to go, was that there was a rumour that Liberace would be there. By Liberace I don’t, of course, mean the popular pianist who coined the phrase ‘cried all the way to the bank’, loved no woman but his mother and died of AIDS in the mid-80s. I mean the acclaimed British writer and traveller whose technique rivalled that of the much-loved musician.

Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness. And yet he was not really exactly like the pianist, because though he did genuinely have the emotional facility of the musician he had only the air of technical facility, there being to even a buttery arpeggio not only the matter of running hands up and down the keys but

L wants to know what βíηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.

At first (because I was explaining that βíηφιν was the instrumental form of βíη, meaning by force or violence) I thought that the writer was like a person who typing puts a hand down one key to the right or left of where it should be, so that an intelligible sentence nrvomrd duffrnly uninyrllihlnlr ot nrstly do, snf yhr gsdyrt you yypr yhr eotdr iy hryd (ψηλαφων means, can I see the line? it means feeling or groping about), and in my mind I saw the hands of Liberace moving rapidly & confidently up and down the keyboard striking keys now black now white. Now I think (as far as a person can be said to think who is taking the place of a talking dictionary) that even this is not quite right, because though Liberace did strew his work with mistakes they were not the kind (πετσσας means spreading, it is the aorist participle of πετννυμι) that you could overlook in that way or rather (you know perfectly well what φαινον means No I don’t It means weave and what form is it here 1st person singular imperfect OK) it is not that he overlooked them (ρσενες means males) but that he looked straight at them with complacency (just a minute). Breathless with adoration would Liberace litter his work with gaping arguments and images knocked awry, stand back, fold arms, Ed Wood abeam at toppling tombstones and rumpled grass (just a minute). Did he notice or not care? He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of (δασμαλλοι: thick-fleeced; οδνεφíς: dark; λíγοισι: withies; withy: a piece of wicker-work; πλωρ: You know what πλωρ means No I don’t Yes you do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Do Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t It means monster That’s what I thought it meant—No wonder I am sticking pins in the father of this child). Here was a man who’d learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.

Od. 10.

Met. 1.

I Sam. I? [Have not read in years.]

I Sam. II-V? [Hell.]