The Last Samurai

I said: I read some of the Penguin translations when I was younger. I said: The interesting thing is that according to Hainsworth’s classic article on Homer & the epic cycle the mark of Homer’s superiority to the cycle is supposed to be richness and expansiveness, & yet it seems as though bareness is the thing that is good in the Icelandic saga. You could say Well, Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial, why is he wrong?

He was giving me another humorous wide-eyed look. He said:

Now I believe you read my book.

I did not know what to say.

I said:

I’ve read all your books.

And he said: Thanks.

He said: I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I thought: I can’t stand this.

I thought of the three Prisoners of Fate. I could walk out any time. I wanted to walk out and I wanted to drop hints. I wanted to mention the Rosetta Stone and watch realisation dawn. I don’t know what I was going to say.

I was just about to say something when I saw Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria on a shelf. I exclaimed artlessly:

Oh, you’ve got Ptolemaic Alexandria!

He said:

I shouldn’t really have bought it but I couldn’t resist.

I didn’t ask where he’d heard of it. Somebody had obviously told him it was a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without.

I said:

Well, it’s a brilliant book.

He said:

Not that it’s much use to me. Did you know there was a Greek tragedy about God and Moses? It’s got it at the back but it’s all in Greek.

I said:

Would you like me to read some for you?

He said:

Oh—

and he said

Well, why not?

I got Volume II off the shelf and I started reading where God is saying Stretch out thy rod in iambic trimeters and I translated as I went along and after about three lines I could see he was looking bored and amazed.

I said:

Well, you get the drift.

He said:

How old are you?

I said I was 11. I said there was nothing very difficult about the passage and anyone who had studied the language for a few months would be able to read it and I had known it for years.

He said: Christ.

I said it was not such a big deal and that J. S. Mill had started Greek at the age of 3.

He said: How old were you when you started?

I said: 4.

He said: Christ.

Then he said:

Sorry, I don’t mean to make you self-conscious, it’s just that I’ve got kids of my own.

I was looking down at Ptolemaic Alexandria thinking I’ve got to say something. I said What did he try to teach them and he said nothing in a formal way but the point was they had watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level. There was a piece of paper at the front of the book. I said: What’s this?

He said: Don’t you recognise it?

and I thought: So he knows

and I thought: How did he know?

I said: Recognise it?

He said: It’s from the Iliad. I thought you’d recognise it. Somebody gave it to me.

I said: Oh, of course.

I said: Have you read it then?

He said: I keep meaning to get around to it.

He said: I think subconsciously it reminds me of Latin.

I said: Of Latin?

He said: I took a year at school and I spent most of it smoking behind the bike shed.

I said I had heard the things worth reading in Latin were things you couldn’t appreciate until you were 15 so maybe it was just the texts.

He said: I don’t think we made it as far as texts, I just remember on the first day the teacher writing some noun on the board with nominative genitive bla bla bla. It all seemed so fucking pointless. I mean, look at the Romance languages. As far as I know every single one got rid of the case endings because the people actually speaking the language thought they were a complete waste of time. I kept thinking why do I have to sit here learning this evolutionary failure of a language?

He was grinning broadly as he said it and he said he thought whatever it was that had made him get out of the class and smoke behind the bike shed instead of sitting in the class learning case endings was probably the thing that had helped most to make him successful if you could call it success.

I was looking at a piece of paper that ended hope you like it Must dash S[illegible scrawl].

I thought: My father is Val Peters.

He said: But I really should read it one of these days, she obviously went to a lot of trouble.

He said: I’m kind of glad mine weren’t put under any pressure to start early, they grow up so fast and they spend so much time in school anyway, but I think it’s amazing what you’ve done I really do and it really does mean a lot that you like my books, I wasn’t just saying that, because at the end of the day it’s not just how many people buy them.

I thought I should say something.

He said: Look, let me give you something else, something that’ll be worth something some day. I mean I don’t know what you think, but maybe you’d like one of these, it’s not as if I’m ever going to read them, they get translated into about 17 languages and you don’t necessarily do signings every time so if I signed one it would be unique,