“Yeah, Merv, but I want to explain about my mum. And Whistlecraft—he didn’t like me to call him Dad, but he was nice about the whole thing. He never really talked to me about it, but I know he didn’t hold it against my mum. Not much. There was something he said once, in poetry—
–as the fellow says.”
“What fellow was that?” said Darcourt, speaking for the first time.
“The fellow in Shakespeare.”
“Oh—that fellow! I thought it might have been something Whistlecraft wrote himself.”
“No. Shakespeare. Whistlecraft was prepared to overlook the whole thing. He understood life, even if he wasn’t much of a hand at the organism.”
“Wally—I call your attention to the fact that there is a lady present.”
“Don’t mind me,” said Maria; “I suppose I am what used to be called a woman of the world.”
“And a fine Rabelaisian scholar,” said Hollier, smiling at her.
“Aha! Rabelaisian scholar? Old-time Frenchman? Dead?” said Mr. Gwilt.
“The truly great are never dead,” said Maria, and suddenly remembered that she was quoting her mother.
“Very well, then. Let us continue on a rather freer line,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t have to remind you university people of the great changes that have taken place in public opinion, and one might almost say in public morals, in recent years. The distinction has virtually vanished, in the newspapers and also in modern fiction—though I haven’t much time for fiction—between what we may define as the O.K. and the Raw. Discretion of language—where is it? Obscenity—where is it? On stage and screen we live in the Age of the Full Frontal. Since the Ulysses case and the Lady Chatterley case the law has had to take unwilling cognizance of all this. If you are a student of Rabelais, Mrs. Cornish—not that I’ve read his stuff, but he has a certain reputation, you know, even among those who haven’t read him—we must assume that you are thoroughly broken to the Raw. But I digress. So let us get back to our real interest. We admit that the late Mrs. Whistlecraft’s life was in some degree flawed—”
“But not Raw,” said Maria. “Nowadays we call it liberated.”
“Exactly, Mrs. Cornish. I see you have an almost masculine mind. So let us proceed. My client is John Parlabane’s son—”
“Proof,” said Mr. Carver. “We’ll want proof.”
“Excuse me, my friend,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t understand your position in this matter. I have assumed that you are in some way an amicus curiae–a friend of the court—but if you are going to advise and interfere I want to know why, and who you are.”
“Name’s George Carver. I was with the RCMP until I retired. I do a little private investigation work now, so as not to be bored.”
“I see. And have you been investigating this matter?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I might, if it came to anything.”
“But you don’t regard this meeting as anything?”
“Not so far. You haven’t proved anything.”
“But you think you know something relevant.”
“I know that Wally Crottel got his job as a security man in this building by saying, among other things, that he had seen some service with the RCMP. He hasn’t. Failed entry. Education insufficient.”
“That may have been indiscreet but it has nothing to do with the matter in hand. Now listen: I said at the beginning that my client and I are relying on the ius naturale—on natural justice, what’s right and proper, what decent people everywhere know to be right. I say it is his right to benefit from anything that accrues from the publication of his father’s novel, Be Not Another, because he is John Parlabane’s rightful heir. And I say that Professor Clement Hollier and Mrs. Arthur Cornish have suppressed that book for personal reasons, and all we ask is some recognition of my client’s right, or we shall be forced to resort to law, and insist on recompense, after publication of the book.”
“How would you do that?” said Darcourt. “Nobody can be forced to publish a book.”
“That’s as may appear,” said Mr. Gwilt.
“Well, it will appear that nobody wants to publish it,” said Maria. “When all the scandal blew up, a great many publishers asked to see the book, and they turned it down.”
“Aha. Too Raw for them, eh?” said Mr. Gwilt.
“No. Too dull for them,” said Maria.
“The book was chiefly an exposition of John Parlabane’s philosophy,” said Darcourt. “And as such it was derivative and tediously repetitious. He had interspersed his long philosophical passages with some autobiographical stuff that he thought was fiction, but I assure you it wasn’t. Stiff as a board.”
“Autobiographical?” said Mr. Gwilt. “And he may have included portraits of living persons that would have caused a fine stink. Political people? Big people in the world of business? And that was why the publishers wouldn’t touch it?”
“Publishers, too, have a fine sense of the O.K. and the Raw, and of that lively area where the two kiss and commingle,” said Maria. “As my dear François Rabelais puts it: Quaestio subtilissima, utrum chimaera in vacuo bombinans possit commedere secundas intentiones. I make no apologies for the Latin, as you are such a dab hand with that language.”
“Aha,” said Mr. Gwilt, imparting a wealth of legal subtlety into the exclamation, though his eyes flickered with incomprehension. “And precisely how do you apply that fine legal maxim to the matter in hand?”
“Translated very roughly,” said Maria, “it might be taken to suggest that you are standing on a banana skin.”
“Though we would not dream of disparaging your admirable argumentum ad excrementum taurorum,” said Hollier.
“What’s he say?” said Wally to his legal adviser.
“Say’s it’s all bullshit. Well, we don’t have to take that kind of thing from people just because they have money and position. Our legal system guarantees a fair deal for everybody. And my client has not had a fair deal. If the book had been published, he would have a right to a share, if not all, of the payment proceeding from that publication. You have not proceeded to publication and we want to know why. That’s what we’re doing here. So I think I’d better be more direct than I’ve been up to now. Where’s this manuscript?”
“I don’t know that you have a right to ask that,” said Hollier.
“A court would have that right. You say publishers refused it?”
“To be scrupulously exact,” said Maria, “one publisher said he might take it if he could put a ghost on it and make whatever could be made of the story, leaving out all Parlabane’s philosophy and moralizing. He said it would have to be made sensational—a real murderer’s confession. But that would have been utterly false to what Parlabane wanted, and we refused.”
“I put it to you that the novel was Raw, and brought in recognizable portraits of living people, and you are protecting them.”
“No, no; so far as I remember the novel—what I read of it—it wasn’t Raw. Not for modern tastes,” said Hollier. “There were references to homosexual encounters, but Parlabane was so allusive and indirect—as compared to his description of how he murdered poor old Urky McVarish—that it came out as rather mild stuff. Not so much Raw as half-baked. He was not an experienced writer of fiction. The publisher Mrs. Cornish has spoken of wanted to make it really Raw, and we would not degrade our old associate Parlabane in that way. What’s Raw and what isn’t is really a matter of taste; the taste may be pungent, but it shouldn’t be nasty. We didn’t at all trust the taste of that publisher.”
“Do you tell me you haven’t read the novel?” said Mr. Gwilt, with stagy incredulity.
“It was unreadable. Even a professor, who is professionally obliged to read a great deal of tedious stuff, couldn’t get through it. Outraged nature overcame me at about page four hundred, and the last two hundred and fifty pages remain unread, so far as I am concerned.”