No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (15 page)

Temporal convergence of “Early” narrator / “Replicas” narrator [“The House on calle Piedras”?].
Stop. Stet
. We’re still in the “The Old Bachelor.”

He knew the bookstore he established there—Columbo, Pallemberg, Palermo—would, on many occasions, provide him with surprises [
Ethics of the Dust
,
Galleries of Whispers
,
Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
,
And the Name of the Star is Wormwood
,
The Goshawk …
]

The Finnish biography of Maturin:
Charles Robert Maturin
,
His Life and Works
, Niilo Idman (Helsinki, 1923).

On the near empty shelves of the bookstore on Montevideo street, there were copies of books that he purchased at a surprisingly low cost: the first volume of Rabelais’
Gargantua
, translated by Thomas Urquhart [
7 Types of Ambiguity
, first edition with dedication], a first edition of Eddison’s
The Worm Ouroboros
, two books by Meredith (
The Shaving of Shagpat
,
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
), and almost every volume of I. A. Richard’s
Modern English
. The Milton is in the dead aunt’s house

Meredith’s monograph on Siegfried Sassoon.

He was about to leave with a bizarre and [little known] treasure, a book of Armenian grammar that was signed by one T. Anlunle in Mexico City in 1965, when from a distance, he noticed [the soft glint of stealth in motion? Try thinking of a concrete comparison] the slow descent of a spider on a book inside a tray he’d already explored. He was well known for his fear of spiders—even amongst those who barely knew him. The creature swayed back and forth pendulously, dexterously, before finally alighting. The book on which it stood seemed to glow under the overhead lighting.

Then he saw the spider stretch out its forelimbs, as if it were the girl, the Donceles’s daughter, inviting an embrace …

He approached the tray into which the miserable creature dropped, and warily examined the book it seemed to select for him: William Morris’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. With the spider nowhere to be seen, he quickly stowed the book in his sleeve. He was looking forward to thumbing through it, as he did when he was young.

The next row of books was so disappointing—for example, three volumes of the works of that impossible poet they tried persuading GD to translate into English, the
novelettes
of Herman Wouk, Vicki Baum, Hans Fallada—he felt he had to check if the “treasure” he had under his sleeve was really the book he thought it was. He looked at the timeworn, almost non-existent binding, the near-extinguished glow [like the liminal glow around a flame: his reason for taking it]. It was old, but at least it was the right book. Then Gabriel Donovan suddenly thought he was too hasty in judging the row of books disappointing, for while flashing his eyes along the upper shelves, past some old gazettes and anthologies of English poetry compiled by Patrick Gannon, he happened upon the very paperback copy of Henry Williamson he needed to complete his collection. Then he found a copy of
And the Name of the Star
by Oliver Stonor, and that hard-to-find French bibelot—which French booksellers gloated was actually impossible-to-find, a claim he not only disputed but which he vowed to confute—
La muse demi mondaine et les antibiotiques
, the first and last work of Luc Crespin—a kind of Radiguet figure to Lucien Rebatet’s Cocteau; that’s to say, a last intimate acquaintance [but we must specify what we mean by “intimate” lest it be understood with the same unscrupulous literality the French scandal-mongers derived from perusing their Littré].

And in another tray he found [the works of Swindon listed before and …] Then he suddenly got the impression he was in his own library and was afraid he was no longer in the place he thought he was …

Because whoever arranged or mixed up the books would never have thought to do so in the following order: [unrealistic books, Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain …]

An ordering that inexplicably corresponded with his own—with Donovan’s—personal, interior, library

Time, air, and substance, aspects of the real we take for granted, but which seemed unreal in that single volume initialed [prepared by] HQ [Herbert Quain] containing both
April March
and
The God of the Labyrinth
. When his fingers found the well-worn edge of a copy of
The Prismatic Bezel
, he lost his breath, and his heart skipped a beat … with a sense of foreboding aptness, there was a copy of
The
Tragedy of S. K
., by John Goodman, lacking a jacket and balanced precariously on a shelf’s edge.

And then, slowly, with a characteristic swaying back and forth, which his best friends had detected when they accompanied him on his bookish excursions, [on their way to Esmé’s] Gabriel Donovan was fading away from, crumbling out of the dream he’d been dreaming. When he found himself again …, he realized he’d arrived, as if by magic, in his own house …

He hadn’t regained his calm after the return journey, which he made believing himself laden with treasure, a journey that felt like a swift descent; nor had he lost sight of those images of private devotion from which he was so rudely awakened …

#??? He was found dead: a happy suppression of consciousness and all conjecture, passively accepted in every tribal dialect [the following day]. [Circumstantial data] No one believed, etc.

No one wanted to believe.

While others—puffed with bombast—appear

To lash the sea’s shoulders
,
skirt the poles

Though blustering of all things tropical;

They lantern the moon
,
lend Apollo a taper

Worse than the lady of my mind
,
my Earth
,

Who
,
once baptized
,
foreswore her place of birth
.

These you will see depicting battle scenes

Full of gorgons
,
griffins
,
and centipedes

Invoking Scylla
,
their runaway harlot
.

Lope, “Epistle to Barrionuevo”

With a grammar book signed by T. Anlunle in which were copied the following lines [from the second sestina]:

Because it was the touch of a distant stream

That made his visible [palpable]
,
broke its surface

As a body falling in the concave glass of night
,

As dreams mirror the last day’s wayward steps

Leading to a false awakening [dawning]
,

To the icy sting of awakening without him

A kind of parody or burlesque of Elizabethan writing

Inquiry about the Progresse of Sickness[e] and the Behavior of Death
. Elizabeth, [Jean-Marie] Maurice Schérer, Gallimard, 1946.

Lord Swindon:
Early Fiction
(André Deutsch, 1964).

Lady Centipede
,
Religious Matters
,
The Game and the Solitude
,
Before & After Firbank
, Auday & Ainchil,

Dreams that money can buy

“Disney contra the metaphysicians …” Perri

The Referent

By Nicasio Urlihrt

Followed by notes and commentary

By Oliverio Lester and Ema Teodelina Wuhl

Epilogue by Luis Chitarroni

Ema Wuhl

Magritte

Apple: western communism

After visiting the pathologist

Inscribe Miss Gee’s verses in a Gideon Bible. See original draft of “The Old Bachelor”

In February 1971, the French journal,
Alusif / Imposture
, launched a short-story competition. Instead of using a panel of judges to arbitrate on their suspiciously nepotistic, allegedly venal, and indisputably subjective standards of taste, winners were chosen for their ability to fulfill two very special criteria. The first was quantitative: whoever managed to adulterate their story with the most references and allusions would win. A key to these allusions should be sent as well, in a separate envelope and signed with a pseudonym (or, if the story was submitted under a pseudonym, a
different
pseudonym), specifying for each allusion or reference the title of the work in question, its author, and, where possible, the appropriate page number, chapter, publisher, and year of publication.

Considering the literary atmosphere of the time—the days of
Tel Quel
, Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion,” and the
Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle
… the era stretching from
The Waste Land
to
Ada
(which latter would have been published right around the same time the contest took place?); not to mention that of
Finnegans Wake
—the second criterion was a patriotic one: French literature might have felt a little depleted, not quite the [roll call] starry firmament it had presented in previous centuries. Why weren’t these great precursors more appropriated [drawn upon]?

The funny thing is an Argentine won. Nicasio Urlihrt, a temporary resident of Paris, wrote the winning story in twenty one days (eight less than Stendhal) with no other library at his disposal than the one in his memory. He was lucky enough to befriend an excellent Antillean translator, Iphigenie Andromaque [Girri,
Je pense a vous
] Prévost, who could translate as fast as the story was written.

The author’s notational convention is given at the beginning

Even stranger, the first writer mentioned is also Argentinian: Osvaldo “Lalo” Sabatani, author of “Sircular Cymmetry,” a type of dialogue borrowing from the Ulyssean theme. Sabatani had had more difficulties. Firstly, his translator happened to be Urlihrt’s wife [Raquel Elena Salafia?], Elena Siesta. She was a fine translator but a slow and painstaking redactor. To achieve his unusual feat, Urlihrt used a detailed notebook. As Oliverio Lester discovered later, he used such a notebook in order to include, with a minimum number of variations, as many allusions as he could to the books he’d read in the previous three years. It was surely the variety of these references, and the way they were incorporated, that won favor with the judges. But what especially impressed them, was the way he adapted these references to his own language in such a way that made them appear fresh, original—it was as if they were being read for the first time—and the way his cryptic style made the writing seem almost inscrutable, the references almost undetectable, but with occasional lapses of more direct and coherent prose which, although less lively, functioned as a series of interludes.

The conception of Urlihrt’s story had little to do with Walsh’s story, “Footnote”

Careless verses

[
Pushkiniana I
,
ode to Istómina’s foot
]

A foot lightly touches the floor

The other
,
delicately crooks—

As the pause before exhale of air

From Aeolian lungs—; they prepare

To ripple-trail across a brook
.

Istómina danced [,] to purge her body

Of desire
,
her soul of apathy
.

Too showy

NO

Poetry

#1 Careless verses

#2 Mid Sixties

#3 Poshlost

#4 Social life

St. Mawr (by Javier Manjares)

It wasn’t long after we finished our meal that Henrietta [Bonham-Carter / / Ormsby-Gore, Gome-Hornsby] once again showed her disapproval in that familiarly ambiguous fashion: free of disdain but not repudiation; of fastidiousness but not disinterest; one of those English ways of objecting that offend more in the performance than the remembrance, but which nevertheless leave an impression. For the objection is always timely but never pointed, well-expressed but barely relevant, and if it is offensive, it offends no one in particular. Henrietta only rarely showed her disapproval, but when she did, it was with practiced accomplishment (the key to which lay in her economy of expression). I had mentioned something about the portrait of F. R. Leavis when her back was turned, and my expression must have reflected a somewhat faded admiration for the author of
The Great Tradition
, which I had read passionately in my youth, a time when I was becoming acquainted with D. H. Lawrence and when his poems (the “local” version, I mean, translated and published in a volume titled
Phoenix
) were required reading. But Henrietta disapproved of my admiration, or perhaps I should say, she implied her disapproval of what was left of my admiration.