I wandered largely without harassment. This was 1972 after all, and one would’ve had to travel to the east coast to find people easily exercised by the length of a dress or the bareness of one’s shoulders. Moreover, the British colonial past was still almost the present and one could pop off Batu Road into the Coliseum and find, on every one of the white-clothed tables, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. This was all interesting enough, but what I had told Slater was true: I was an editor, and The Modern Review was my life. I actually preferred to sit inside my hotel room and read, not only the poetry submitted to the magazine, but also Paradise Lost, which always reminded me, Mr Leavis notwithstanding, of what my life was given to. In the afternoon I again paid service to the word by writing long letters to my three most important board members: Lord Antrim, Wystan Auden, and a wonderful Mrs McKay, the divorced wife of a Manchester industrialist whose generosity had saved the magazine more than once. In each letter I mentioned our outstanding printers’ bill but did not really expect anything to come of it. They had risen to the occasion too many times before and were, I suspected, exhausted by a magazine which might never be what we had all hoped.
Slater showed up on Thursday, unexpectedly falling into step beside me as I walked across the bridge towards Jalan Campbell where I had been anticipating the company of sodden red-faced planters who I hoped would say appalling raj-like things.
He was wearing walking shorts and heavy boots, and was still so sunny and unrepentant that I began to wonder if he had forgotten our conversation at the Faber dinner party, if he imagined that I would actually enjoy exploring a steaming Asian city on my own.
Micks, he said, I have something to tell you.
Ah, I thought—and was disappointed when he launched not into an apology but a very detailed account of his hike through the jungle with an Anglophile Chinese poet. As I listened, I wondered why a man would wear shorts in the jungle where his unprotected skin would be so badly scratched. Was it simply to show his legs?
Did you see that, he asked suddenly. No? Well, it was Die Sonette an Orpheus, in the 1923 Insel-Verlag edition. Must be worth a hundred quid.
For sale?
Don’t be ridiculous. No, in that horrid shop back there. Come. You must look.
I actually did not wish to be controlled by John Slater, but he had his great paw on my forearm and I had no choice but stare into the same bicycle repair shop which had taken my attention on Monday. The same white man with ulcers on his legs was sitting on the broken plastic chair and indeed was reading, by the light of a naked bulb, Sonnet to Orpheus.
See, said Slater.
Hearing this, the white man lifted his mild eyes and, having considered Slater for a moment, slowly raised his arm in salute.
Christ, said Slater.
His hand still clamped around my arm, he propelled me forcibly back along the street.
Do you know him?
He looked at me with his big chin working as if he were chewing something unpleasant. Know him? he said indignantly. Of course not.
And that is really where the story begins, for it was clear to me that he was lying.
2
The editors of literary magazines, while conceiving of themselves as priests, actually travel like brush salesmen, always making sure they have a sample of their wares packed along with socks and underwear, and it was not at all eccentric of me to bring several issues of The Modern Review to Malaysia. One of these had a very fine translation of Stefan George, which I expected a reader of Rilke would admire and so the following morning, at half past six, I wrapped it in some pretty paper and set off back to Jalan Campbell. I had no notion of how this half-mile walk was going to change my life. If I had only stayed in bed, I would not be where I am today, struggling in a web of mystery that I doubt I ever shall untangle.
Yet once I had started there was nothing to save me from myself. Indeed, all the obsessive tendencies which have made me a good editor were now brought to bear on this abandoned white man. I would not be happy until I knew who he was, although my curiosity wasn’t quite so dispassionate, for I already imagined him to be ‘lost’ and wished, for my own personal guilty reasons, to give him comfort.
I found the shophouse very easily and was well inside its rather oily smelling interior before I realised that my man was not in residence. In his place was the Chinese woman I had previously seen packing fish in plastic bags. Close-up, she revealed herself to be a fierce little thing with a flat round face marked by two long jagged scars.
I greeted her as my phrase book ordered: Selamat pagi, I said, but she was working to a different script.
Wha you want?
There was nothing to do but offer my precious quarterly.
Wha for this?
English poetry, I said, for the man. Orang. Does he read English?
Her lip curled, giving an impression of implacable hostility, towards poetry perhaps, or England, or sweating white women—who could tell?
Poetry?
Will you please give it to him?
Not here now, she said, and tucked my proffered gift away as if she might later use it to wipe her bottom.
Selamat tingal, I said, and left the shop feeling very foolish, striding along the street with my head down, wishing that I had minded my own bloody imperial business. Most of all I wished I had not wasted my magazine.
Were it not for the squeal of a buckled bicycle wheel I might not have spotted my Rilke reader. In all the confusion of cars and trucks and motorbikes, it took a moment to recognize who was pushing the injured bicycle along the road. In the gritty, humid air, the white man did not look particularly alien, simply another human figure pressing forward under the clammy weight of the sky. I was by now rather at the limits of my social confidence, and if he had not stopped, I doubt I would have had the courage to address him.
Was that John Slater, he asked.
The moment I heard that nasal, reedy voice I understood he was Australian.
Yesterday, he said. That matt saleh with the camera?
Yes, I said.
He raised his thin black eyebrows but offered nothing more.
Do you know him? I said.
As he considered this, I admired his face, the impressive eyebrows falling away at a severe angle, the possibility of a smile hiding in the shadowy corners of his rather wistful mouth. He was bone and muscle, self-effacing, a little melancholy.
Not really-lah.
Are you a poet?
He looked a little startled. I thought it was Slater, he said, then blinked. Isn’t it extraordinary how some people remain recognisable? One kind-lah.
Shall I remember you to him?
Oh, he wouldn’t know me, he said, and with no more than a nod of farewell, he set off, pushing the squeaking bicycle along the edge of a treacherous storm-water drain. Nothing in his manner invited me to follow and so I wandered back towards the hotel wondering what curious events had led a cultured Australian to a repair shop in a street called Jalan Campbell.
3
At Heathrow John Slater had promised me chili crab and banana-leaf curry, but he was clearly a man who made his promises easily. I had been left alone to find what delicacies I could and had already wandered out into the dusty streets of Kampong Baru where there was a market, not in the street exactly, but in a sort of car park under a pair of giant mango trees. When I returned there it was already dark. It was not raining but I imagined it was the season that my father, who had done his stint in India, called Mango Showers, and in the yellow nimbus of the carbide lamps above the stalls and trolleys of the vendors, you could see and smell the damp as it mixed with the odours of sandalwood and satay and the inevitable undercurrent of sewage. In the distance there were a few sodium streetlamps and in the liquid dark beneath the mangoes one could see the glistening possum eyes of Malay men and boys whose idea of my rather tall white body seemed to have been formed by brightly lit images of American giants with ripped dresses and open thighs.
W
here you come from?
They were not threatening but they were persistent and, finally, a little creepy.
Where your husband?
I had set out feeling angry with Slater but when I noticed him, seated alone at a table beneath the mangoes, I felt considerable relief.
Seeing me, he rose, two long arms held high into the night, as if he had been waiting to greet me all this time. I am not being modest when I say that I looked a fright: frumpy cotton frock, no hat, no make-up, my hair cut in a style one can achieve only with two mirrors and a pair of nail scissors, a look I had mastered years before at St Mary’s Wantage.
Ah, the White Goddess!
What tosh! Yet when his hand enclosed my own, it was persuasive. I cannot explain it—partly the size, but also a dry sort of heat, like a river rock. I was ridiculously relieved to see him.
Then he was doing everything at once, seating me in the most gallant style, calling for more beer, delivering a proprietary discourse on the etiquette of eating from a banana leaf.
I must say I do envy you, Micks, discovering everything yourself for the first time. You should write it all down. You know Lafcadio Hearn? ‘Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible.’ A tiny fellow, Hearn, very strange-looking. ‘They are evanescent, you know; they will never come to you again.’
It was not hard to believe that he’d learned those inconsequential lines just now, and only in order to charm me. He was capable of it, I’m sure. Yet when he crushed my hand I was completely persuaded of his sincerity, also that his abandonment of me had been an exquisitely designed gift which I had insufficient character to properly appreciate. Thus, so easily, was my anger dealt with, and soon I was happily recounting my little adventure with the old Australian.
He said he knew you.
What else?
That you wouldn’t know him.
He looked back over his shoulder—marginal rude, I decided.
Am I boring you, John?
I remember him, he said—but his eyes had become dull, even churlish.
And?
He shrugged and lit a cigarette.
Oh for God’s sake, John, please don’t make me draw you out.
He raised an eyebrow. Be nice, Micks.
You be bloody nice, John, I’ve been waiting four bloody days.
It was Christopher Chubb.
You know that means nothing to me.
Slater deftly paddled his fingers in his rice and curry. Really? I was sure he must have fallen before your pencil.
I sipped my watery iced beer in silence.
Seriously, he said, I cannot believe he has never crossed your desk. Formally very rigorous, a great fellow for the villanelle and the double sestina…. Now that is an extraordinarily rigid form.
Yes, John, I do know what a double sestina is.
He smiled. Then you will know that our scrofulous friend was exactly that sort of fellow. Australian … ‘born/In a half savage country, out of date;/Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn.’ A very serious provincial academic poet, committed to a life of envy and disappointment.
Then you do know him?
Instead of answering, he patted the back of my hand. Did you go to Bruno Hat’s opening, Micks? No, you would have been too young. He was an artist. Milo wrote a huge piece about it, I remember.
This was in London?
Ssh. Listen. I actually saw the so-called paintings, he said, tapping the hot ash of his cigarette with a naked finger. Not really my taste, bits of cork and wool and shards, but half of Chelsea was there wolfing down the Cypriot sherry. Later, I remembered a fellow sitting in the corner in a wheelchair, face all wrapped up as if he was dying of toothache. He hardly invited conversation but afterwards it turned out that he was Bruno Hat and it would have been hopeless to talk to him, so I was told, because he was Polish and spoke no word of English. Just the same, an extraordinary amount was said about the art. Milo wasn’t the only one, but just as the whole thing reached a great crescendo ‘Bruno Hat’ quietly revealed that he was actually Bryan Howard.
Who actually spoke English rather well.
Yes, it was a prank. Made a few faces red, but no-one died, and even Milo—who made the most hysterical claims—still went on to be Sir Milo Wilson and no-one would bother mentioning it today. Don’t be so impatient, Micks. My point is that a prank’s a prank and Bruno Hat wasn’t going to pull the whole of English culture down around our ears. Whereas if you take a country like Australia, you see the whole thing is much more fragile, and this old codger with the evil-looking boils, Chubb, was the author of a similar sort of prank. Have you heard of the McCorkle Hoax? No? Well, our Christopher Chubb was the villain.
The hoaxer, you mean.
Of a horribly prim, self-righteous sort. This all takes place in 1946. Imagine—twenty-four years after ‘The Waste Land.’ You’d think the battles had been fought and the bodies buried, but that’s the rather splendid thing about your mother’s people.
My heart actually leapt at the mention of my mother. Slater saw this. At least, I believe he did.
His eyes brightened. He slowed his pace. Remember, this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways.
I thought to myself, He will talk about my mother now. But I was wrong. This is why, Micks, you can still have this fierce and bloody battle going on in 1946, when your friend in the sarong was a handsome shy young fellow seducing girls with his jazz piano. He was actually a little more ‘chubby’ in those days, if you’ll forgive the pun, and when he was not drinking he had a sweet and rather passive manner which hid the fact that he had this awful chip on his shoulder.
Like Mummy in a way.
Slater paused, looking as if he was about to deny knowing the person I’d referred to. Oh darling, he sighed at last, your mother was never chippy. She was so absolutely Upper North Shore. Poor old Chubb came from the dreary lower-middle-class suburbs. I would say he loathed where he came from.
Exactly, I said. Mummy could never abide Australians.
He looked at me very directly, long enough to make me feel uncomfortable.
I thought, You bastard, you killed her.
In any case, he said, and his tone was very cool, our Mr. Chubb had what you could only call a phantom pregnancy. That is, he gave birth to a phantom poet, a certain ‘Bob McCorkle’ who of course never really existed but to whom our bitter little Australian gave a ragingly modern opus: life, death, a whole biography—including, believe it or not, a birth certificate. And then he delivered the lot—with the exception of the birth certificate, which came later—to a journal with the rather pretentious name of Personae. He did a persuasive job, actually. Made a complete ass of the editor and became a celebrity along the way. Did you give him a copy of The Modern Review?
Why would I do that?
You’re an editor, Micks. Of course you did. Which issue was it?
The one with the George translation.
He’ll hate it, he said gleefully. You’ll have him spitting chips all the way to Ulu Klang.
I thought how wounded he would be if I told him that someone would hate his magazine, if he ever had one. What happened to the editor? I asked.
He killed himself I do believe.
John! That’s horrible.
He sipped his beer and crunched the ice blocks between his teeth. It is rather a long story. I forget the particulars. Look, here comes the satay Probably loaded with parasites, but awfully good. We should get some of those Indian thing-ohs … those … Damn, my memory’s going. I forget what they’re called.
The Indian thing-ohs were murtaba, and as Slater rushed away to order some I realised that all my sentimental feelings for the old ‘lost’ man had completely evaporated. Chubb had preyed on the best, most vulnerable quality an editor has to offer. I mean that hopeful, optimistic part which has you reading garbage for half your life just so you might find
, one day before you die, a great and unknown talent.
Fuck him, I thought. I hope he hates the George translation. I hope it fries his tiny antipodean brain.
4
The following morning Slater telephoned, with such an uncharacteristic concern for my health that I immediately asked if he was unwell.
Actually, yes. He paused. How are you?
Not wonderful.
Another pause. Stomach?
I suppose it was the satay I said.
No, it was the fucking ice, he said. I can’t believe I let them put ice in my beer, probably washed the damn stuff in the gutter. So much for the sainted Bumis. They pay for good ice and then get it so dirty they have to wash it in the filthy drain. You don’t have any Enterovioform do you?
I have two left.
Micks?
Yes.
This is very humiliating … I don’t dare stray far from the lavatory.
I waited for him to ask me to personally deliver my Enterovioform. Very few people would have done this, and fewer still would I have obliged. Just the same, I immediately began to dress.
When the phone rang again I answered it very crossly.
John, I said, I am very happy to bring you my drugs, but you must remember that I happen to be rather out of sorts myself.
Yes, hello, said a strange, papery voice. The remainder was drowned by the metallic roar of small engines.
Who is this?
Chubb, he shouted. Chubb here. Is that Miss Wode-Douglass?
How on earth did you find me?
Name in your magazine, he said. I’ll come and see you, can or cannot?
Later I discovered this ‘can or cannot’ was very proper Malaysian English, but on this first encounter, hearing it delivered in Chubb’s Australian accent, I judged it not only illiterate but disturbingly false.
I’m actually rather ill, I said.
I have medicine.
Having no enthusiasm for any diagnosis he might make, I remained silent.