It was (you’re ahead of me, Reader) Gustav Slavorigin, who had secretly flown in on a British military plane and made an unscheduled landing on Swiss soil at some hush-hush airfield in the mountains.
Why, I instantly wondered, had Slavorigin accepted the invitation? Had he grown so stir crazy that the prospect of spending forty-eight hours as the guest of honour of an unpretentious but also unprestigious literary festival in the Bernese boondocks struck him as a heaven-sent break from the frustrations of day-in day-out isolation and confinement? Was it, indeed, the event’s very third-ratedness which tempted him, as offering him a chance to be fêted as the literary lion he knew himself to be without the concomitant risk of exposure that he would run at some higher-powered do, assuming there even existed such an event in the world of books?‡ This, for me, was the real mystery of the Mystery Guest.
Intriguingly, when we started comparing notes, we discovered that, with two exceptions, Evie and Hugh Spaulding, we had all had previous encounters with Slavorigin.
As I wrote earlier, he and I had been contemporaries at Edinburgh University. Sanary, for his part, had written a lengthy, controversial article in the Tribune de Genève, one later reprinted both in Libération and the New York Review of Books, laying out side by side half-a-dozen quite lengthy passages from Wayfarer, a novel I described in this memoir’s Prologue, and half-a-dozen near-identical passages from an obscure Bulgarian novel published in the nineteen-sixties, one little-read but passionately admired by those few who had read it. He also implied that if Wayfarer, ‘translated into thirty languages’ as the blurb of the paperback edition trumpeted, was never published in Sofia, it was not for the reason offered by Slavorigin himself, that he could comfortably write about his native land only if he knew that nobody in it, and in particular his own close relatives, would ever read him, but rather that he was fearful of being caught red-handed in an unforgivable act of plagiarism. Slavorigin threatened to take legal action but, for whatever reason, confined himself in the end to writing a stinging response in, precisely, the New York Review of Books. He accused his assailant not only of feigning a fluency in the Bulgarian language which he didn’t possess – although, in actual fact, Sanary had made no such pretence, having depended for the nitty-gritty details of his exposé on an acquaintance of his, a Bulgarian-born academic in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Basel – but also of professional jealousy born of personal talentlessness. Displaying, in his counter-response, a lofty disregard for Slavorigin’s ad hominem insults and insinuations, Sanary made the further point that Wayfarer wasn’t the first occasion on which the Anglo-Bulgarian author had, as he coyly but killingly phrased it, ‘cherry-picked another man’s brains’: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes shared its premise of a suicide’s last day on earth with Le feu follet, a semi-classic novel, conveniently unread beyond the French hexagon, by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a dandified tombeur de dames, a Nazi collaborationist and an eventual suicide himself. And since these were unlikely to be the last of his thefts, it would be interesting, he concluded menacingly, to know what some more thorough translingual investigation might still uncover.
Meredith had interviewed Slavorigin for the Paris Review in the immediate wake of the scandal provoked by Out of a Clear Blue Sky. They hadn’t got on. She had thought him odious, and near as dammit said so in print, odious above all for his derisive attitude towards September 11. As for Autry, who had met him around the same period, he stated only, without elaborating on its relevance to his view of the man, that he himself had witnessed the fall of both Towers from the twenty-seventh storey window of his publisher’s office. Finally, unknown to any of us, including me, it transpired that Jochen had actually been the German translator of Slavorigin’s first novel, Dark Jade. He, too, had found him a handful. Why, we asked.
‘Well, as most writers would, I suppose, he wanted me to translate his novel as literally as possible without doing violence to the language I was translating it into. Naturally, I had no problem with that, and so I rendered the title as Dunkle Jade, which in German does mean nothing more than Dark Jade. But Slavorigin wasn’t satisfied. To his English ear, he told me, dunkle was a silly-sounding word. He asked me if it wouldn’t remind German readers, as it reminded him, of dummkopf. I assured him it wouldn’t. He still wasn’t satisfied. And he got his way, his pig-headed way. The book was eventually published as Lust. What a title! Not to mention that it had already been taken by Elfriede Jelinek. The man may be a genius,’ he said calmly, ‘he’s also a dummkopf himself. A fucking buffoon.’
For a writer it always comes as a slight shock to hear his translator pronounce a word he himself has never asked him to translate, especially if it’s one of the f-words. There was a silence. Then Evie, who couldn’t abide silences, spoke up.
‘As somebody once said, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’
‘Sure and begorrah!’ exclaimed Hugh. ‘That it is!’
I thought my head would burst.
* I always wear a scarf. It’s an indispensable element of my ‘look’.
† Author of The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie, all well worth reading.
‡ For better or worse, and probably better, we writers have no Cannes Festival of our own, no waterfall of a red carpet cascading down the steps of the Palais, no superstar poets, novelists or essayists, no pulchritudinous chick-lit starlets coyly mislaying their bikini tops on the plage.
Chapter Seven
The restaurant in which we all dined together that evening,* situated six or seven kilometres out of town, was housed inside a pseudo-Palladian pavilion set down in a paradisal, many-acred park. In the dining room itself were more gilt-framed mirrors, ugly ormolu mantelpiece clocks and heavy velveteen curtains than I had ever seen together in any interior. All in all, it was one of those pretentious establishments in which, by a curious paradox, the extortionate prices paid by their clients, prices we could only guess at as the menu gave no indication of what they might be, are also part of what is being paid for.
Sweet and schoolboyish in a sober pinstriped suit which wasn’t, but looked at though it were, two sizes too large for him, Düttmann was already there when I arrived just behind Hugh Spaulding, with whom I’d shared the first of a small fleet of laid-on taxis. About a minute into the ten-minute ride, Hugh had begun a conversation with me that was still ongoing when our driver pulled up in the pavilion’s treelined driveway, which meant that we were obliged to continue talking outside in the cold for a while longer before entering. It turned out that he was in grave financial difficulties.