The Last Samurai (7 page)

He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.

I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale

it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850.

& I said NO.

I said You know a lot of these words don’t you, and he said Yes, and I said Why don’t you practise reading the words you know and you can pick FIVE WORDS that you don’t know and I will explain them.

I don’t know how much of this deal he understood. He asked for Neptune, moulded, commemorate, successful, material, insulate and submarine. I explained them in a manner which I leave to the imagination. He read a few words that he knew and put the book on the floor. Then he went back for another book. What a delightful surprise! In, And, To and our old friend The in
Truth and Other Enigmas
! Sadly, however, no sign of gutta percha or Neptune.

He put the book on the floor and went back to the shelf.

20 books later I thought: This is not going to work.

I said: Put the book back on the shelf

& he took it down with a cry of glee

so I put it back and I put him in his playpen and he started to sob.

I said: Look, why don’t you look at all the nice pictures in
Classic Plastics
, and whenever you know a word you can read the word, look at this lovely yellow radio

and he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOO

I said: Well look, here’s
Truth and Other Enigmas
, that’s got lots and lots and lots of words, let’s see if you know a word on this page

& he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOOO and tore the page from the book and hurled the book away.

I thought: Let’s think of some other simple task. A simple task that can be mastered on a daily basis that will not lead to the transfer of hundreds of books to the floor.

So I took him to Grant & Cutler and I bought a little French picture book and
Yaourtu la Tortue
and
L’Histoire de Babar
(as well as a copy of Rilke’s
Letters on Cézanne
which they happened to have in stock). I taught him a few simple words on a daily basis for a few days and he left the English books alone.

I thought: It worked! It worked!

One day he found some French books on a shelf. I explained five words in
Zadig
. Soon 20 French books had followed it to the floor. Then he went back to the English books.

I thought: Let’s think of another simple task.

I thought arithmetic could be the simple task. So I taught him to count past 5 and he counted up to 5,557 over a period of three days before collapsing in sobs because he had not reached the end & I said with the genius of desperation that the good thing about infinity is that you know you’ll never run out of numbers. I taught him to add 1 to a number which seemed a simple task & he covered 20 sheets of graph paper with calculations: 1+1=2 2+1=3 3+1=4 until he was carried sobbing to bed. I once read a book in which a boy who studied too much at an early age came down with brain fever and was reduced to imbecility; I have never come across a case of brain fever
outside
a book, but still I was concerned & would have liked to stop but he sobbed if I tried to stop. So I taught him to add 2 to a number and he covered 20 sheets with 2+2=4 3+2=5.

How old was he asks a reader. I think he was about 3.

He settled down now and as long as he could cover 20 sheets with a particular calculation he did not need to go on to infinity. He did not need to take the books off their shelves. I taught him to multiply single numbers & now on 20 sheets he put times tables for the numbers 1–20. I have no idea how you would make a 3-year-old do this if he did not want to any more than I know how you could stop one that wants to, but when he had done it for a couple of months it was easy to explain variables & functions & increments. So by the time he was 4 he could read English & some French & cover 20 sheets with graphs for x+1, x+2, x+3, x+4; x
²
+ 1, x
²
+2 & so on.

About a year ago I snatched a moment to read
Iliad
16. I had been typing in
Melody Maker
1976 and had reached the point in an interview with John Denver where the singer explained:

You know, Chris … I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person.

It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station or the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being.

It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody.

This was the kind of thing a recent President of the United States (like Denver, a genuinely nice guy) had tended to say, and as there was no point thinking about his particular way of bringing value to the life of others I thought it was a good time to take a break and read
Iliad
16. I had been typing for five or six hours so it was a good day so far.

Iliad
16 is the book where Patroclus is killed—he goes into battle wearing Achilles’ armour to encourage the Greeks & unnerve the Trojans, since Achilles still refuses to fight. He wins for a while but he goes too far; Apollo makes him dizzy & takes away his armour, & he is wounded by Euphorbus, & then Hector kills him. I had remembered suddenly that Homer addresses Patroclus in the vocative & that it is strangely moving. Unfortunately I could not find
Iliad
13–24, I could only find 1–12, so I decided to read Hector & Andromache in Book 6 instead.

As soon as I sat down L came up to look at the book. He stared & stared. He said he couldn’t read any of it. I said that was because it was in Greek & had a different alphabet & he said he wanted to learn it.

The last thing I wanted was to be teaching a 4-year-old Greek.

And now the Alien spoke, & its voice was mild as milk. It said: He’s just a baby. They spend so much time in school—wouldn’t he be better off playing?

I said: Let him wait to be bored in a class like everyone else.

The Alien said: It will only confuse him! It will destroy his confidence! It would be kinder to say no!

The Alien has a long eel-like neck and little reptilian eyes. I put both hands around its throat & I said: Rot in hell.

It coughed & said sweetly: So sorry to intrude. Admirable maternity! All time devoted to infant amelioration. Selflessly devoted!

I said: Shut up.

It said: Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

I said: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

—& I wrote out a little table for him:

& I said: There’s the alphabet.

He looked at the table and he looked at the page.

I said: It’s perfectly simple. As you can see a lot of the letters are the same as the ones you already know.

He looked at the table and he looked at the page and he looked at the table.

The Alien said: He is only four

Mr. Ma said: Coupez la difficulté en quatre

I said patiently:

I said patiently a lot of things which it would try my patience even more to repeat. I hope I am as ready as the next person to suffer for the good of others, and if I knew for a fact that even 10 people this year, next year or a thousand years from now would like to know how one teaches a 4-year-old Greek I hope I would have the decency to explain it. As I don’t know this I think I will set this aside for the moment. L seems to be transferring
Odyssey 5
word by word to pink file cards.

Emma was as good as her word and I was as good as my word.

In the summer of 1985 I began working as a secretary in a small publishing house in London which specialised in dictionaries and non-academic works of scholarship. It had an English dictionary that had first come out in 1812 and been through nine or ten editions and sold well, and a range of technical dictionaries for native speakers of various other languages that sold moderately well, and a superb dictionary of literary Bengali which was full of illustrative material and had no rival and hardly sold at all. It had a two-volume history of sugar, and a three-volume survey of London doorknockers (supplement in preparation), and various other books which gradually built up a following by word of mouth. I did not want to be a secretary & I did not particularly want to get into publishing, but I did not want to go back to the States.

Emma was really the next worst thing to the States. She loved America in the way that the Victorians loved Scotland, French Impressionists Japan. She loved an old Esso station on a state highway in a pool of light with a round red Coca-Cola sign swinging in the wind, and a man on a horse thinking vernacular thoughts among scenes of spectacular natural beauty, and a man in a fast car on a freeway in LA. She loved all the books I’d been made to read at school, and she loved the books we didn’t read in school because they might be offensive to born-again Baptists. I did not know what to say.