A Hungarian might do something lavish and extravagant along those lines. He might keep madness further at bay if he took to writing in Hungarian.
Come to think of it, a limitless supply of Marlboros would not come amiss — but no, an American would find that quite shocking.
Cissy knew she had to be in New York, and she knew Ralph had to do the things he was doing for her, but oh! it was horrible, grubby and horrible. People he knew had read her book and sent quotable quotes and now her book would be plastered with names of people whose work she despised. Was it like this in Europe? She wished she was back in the white cellar with its brick walls and its green-and-white tiled bathroom and its gleaming black flat-screen TV. It would be so different, so different and good, if her book were read by a man in an unassuming check shirt who smoked Marlboros and called Adorno Teddie Wiesengrund the Wunderkind. It wasn’t about the quotes, though if the name could go in the book with all the others plastered there she would not feel so sick.
She ran into Rachel at a party at the KGB. She said, “I think we should do something for Peter Dijkstra!” (She did not know if Ralph had asked Rachel, and this way she did not have to think about it.) She talked wildly and impulsively and enthusiastically.
Rachel said, “Well, I love Peter Dijkstra.” She wore skinny white jeans and a sloppy lilac-blue v-necked sweater, sleeves rucked up to her elbows, cashmere. She was drinking Campari. She said, “But I don’t know. He seems pretty private, or at least that’s the way I imagine. Let’s see what Gil has to say.”
Gil had come back from the bar. He said, “I’m a sucker for really good vodka. They have stuff here you just don’t see anywhere else. I’m behind on a deadline, but hey, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe the piece needed an authentic Russian vodka with an authentically unpronounceable name.”
Cissy told the story of walking into Angel’s Place. She said it was like walking into a hotel and seeing Wittgenstein writing at a table.
“Awesome!” said Gil. He did not pump her for details, but she gave some anyway.
She said, “I think we should do something!”
“What kind of thing?” said Gil.
She did not really know. She did not know enough to know the kind of thing. She babbled about conferences, readings, a lecture. She said he should have a trade publisher, like Sebald, a book deal with a lot of money.
Gil took a swallow of vodka. “Ahhhh,” he said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean. The thing is, there are people who like that kind of thing. They like hustling, and they’re good at it. But even so they don’t just run out in the street and randomly hustle, they get approval, an arrangement, authorization. Those might be good things for him, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable rushing around and orchestrating on his behalf. And the other thing is, I’d be afraid of losing something that really means a lot to me, something very precious. Something I need so much I can’t imagine life without it. What if it changed the books for me? What if I no longer had them for myself in this private place where it’s just me and the book? It doesn’t work that way for people who like hustling, you don’t get the impression that agents have lost something they loved. But maybe that’s why it makes sense for that kind of person to do that kind of work. Does he have an agent? Maybe he should talk to Ralph.”
“I did talk to Ralph about it, but he made regretful noises about the market for translations.”
“Oh, Ralph says these things but he’s just trying to be sensible because he’s so impulsive.” Rachel, indulgent. “If he falls in love with a book he’ll besiege people.”
Ralph was not an intellectual but maybe the secret of success was not caring. Or maybe an actual genius would be so far above, would be used to being so far above, that it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it would matter, though, that Ralph was so careful to be cautious. If you went to a café he would order wheatgrass juice and gluten-free toast with tapenade — that is, he would insist on going to the kind of café where you could order these things. Maybe a man who had spent five years in an asylum needed someone who stayed sane without effort.
Cissy knew it was not safe to say these things to Rachel. The magic carpet had carried her on but Ralph was still a good friend.
Needless to say, crowdsourcing a limitless supply of Marlboros was not an idea whose time had come.
Partly to keep madness at bay, and partly to take the most direct route to keeping his credit cards afloat, he was writing in English. He could not see the point of writing in Dutch in the hope that he would join the elect. Why should he get the lucky ticket and be translated and touted? He had had two novellas and some stories turned into English by the kind of publisher that will publish novellas and stories, and though the phrase “cult classic” had come to his ears it did not buy many Marlboros. This is what you get if you are dependent on an editor whose wife happens to know some Dutch. But if you write in English you can send the thing anywhere, you can send it to the big boys, people who wouldn’t touch a novella with a bargepole.
He had a little pack of file cards on which he wrote words and phrases that took his fancy, and he constructed stories out of them. Stories, okay, not the fast track to debt-free nirvana, but you can’t be always breathing down your own neck. Think of Gurrelieder. Something that starts out small and self-contained can morph (“morph”! English is so great!) into an extravaganza. You have to give the horse its bit.
He was sane enough to spot likely words in a text, and sane enough to write them on a file card, and sane enough to string them together, or rather doing these things kept his mind quiet and good. He didn’t know if he could do much more. But it was nice not having to be cheery and down-to-earth and sensible for cheery sensible down-to-earth Dutch nurses and orderlies. It was okay now to lie quietly on the bed staring at the wall.
He got an effusive e-mail from the girl who had made coffee late one night.
Probably she got his address from the people who published the novellas.
He wrote a polite reply.
An effusive reply came within 10 minutes. There was a lot more sincerity than he knew what to do with.
She mentioned talking to her agent and his regretful comments on translation in the United States.
He was already a bit tired but clearly this was a lead which must be followed. He explained a little about the file cards and writing in English.
Fifteen minutes later, when he was starting to hope that was an end of it, a new message popped up. She had talked to her agent who would love to see some pages.
He could not say why, but he really disliked that use of the word “pages.”
At this point he was ready to go back to bed.
This was not the way to deal with all those credit cards.
She had included the agent’s e-mail address. He clicked on it and attached a Word document (after all these years he still hated Word). He explained to the agent that he normally wrote in longhand but this was what he had happened to type up.