Lord Swindon: A Bachelor in Bedlam
Adam Pause
Make sure the titles accord with the kinds of events narrated. Insert the fragment of St. Mawr which corresponds to the initiation ceremony.
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I adore italics, don’t you? A. R. Firbank
“News from Agraphia / Alusiva”
#1 PRECISIONS
1.
Agraphia / Alusiva, a journal founded by Nicasio Urlihrt [(Emilio Teischer)] and his wife, Amanda Corelli Estrugamou [(Elena Siesta)], intended to be entirely anonymous. It was to publish only the best literature, at least according to the couple’s criteria. Their taste for pseudonyms, a legitimate reflection of their era’s zeitgeist (and the cause of wildfire gossip once word got out), yields to serious critical scrutiny today. The contributors were known for — or ignored thanks to — the heresy they’d committed, and of which they took every opportunity to boast, even calling themselves “the writers without stories.” They went around publishing books espousing the theory that it’s better to simply write stories than to write about the writing of stories, and to illustrate this, they simply wrote stories. Few readers remember those stories today, but many recall the anecdotes associated with [relating to?] them. [Such that] Forgetting is not so serious an affront as long as we remember what it is we’ve forgotten. If it were [it was?] ever to become necessary to exonerate [the coterie, the conspirators], Nurlihrt would just publish a series of [unsigned] editorials to adduce a controversial synthesis of two seemingly incompatible theses, and at the same time, [to] proclaim that generation and corruption are one and the same. From the middle of the last century to the beginning of this, Agraphia / Alusiva was the evangelizing force behind this and many other naïve generalizations.
Oliverio Lester, Plan for a Preface / / [without assistance] for a Plagiarism, draft agreement
2.
Four days after the crime, Lalo arrived at the office on Basavilbaso Street, where Elena and Nicasio were waiting for him. He told them he’d spent the last four days not knowing what to do. On Tuesday, he shaved, called Elena and Nicasio from a public phone, and had a chance meeting with Belisario on the street. An hour later, he was at Elena and Nicasio’s place. What else could he do? Elena went to the kitchen to get some scones. Lalo said he had an argument with Spiro the previous Thursday. Spiro left, slamming the door behind him, but then came back the next day acting as if nothing had happened. They got into bed, spending some time in silence, looking out the window, watching the lights of a neighbor’s Christmas tree flashing intermittently. Eventually, said Lalo to the couple, Spiro got up to retrieve a pack of cigarettes but, when he returned, he had a knife in his hands. He exhibited, saying it was a trophy he stole from his brother’s house, although it was a house they both shared. But you’re not interested in knives, said Lalo to Spiro, you’ve never been interested in them, so why the hell are you showing off something you’re not interested in? Apparently it belonged to his father. Lalo went to the chair to heap his clothes and retrieve a cutthroat razor. Spiro said that that too once belonged to his father. He’d decided to bring these objects to Lalo’s house where they might prove more useful than in the house he shares with his brother. Lalo said — gesturing politely to refuse Elena’s offer of a scone — that he later learned Spiro was never quite right in the head, but that between the time he left and the time he came back, he seemed to have lost yet another marble. The whole time Lalo was speaking, Nicasio scrutinized him with a look of disgust, although he’d later say, in more distinguished company, that “Lalo never ceased to disgust me.”
3.
Agraphia began publishing in the late fifties. The journal lasted until the mid-nineties. The content seems to suggest that every page was set aside for “a word-pimp’s larding-on of obscurities and contradictions, the better to obfuscate the plagiarism — and written in light tone to sugar over the gravity of the crime.” Inspired by the sequence of plagiarisms (“Misery of a Realist,” the novel Dreadmist, and the omitted story by Birt), one could either pursue the conventional path of reading by beginning with the prelims, or start with the appendices and work backwards.
Founded by Nicasio Urlihrt (Emilio Teischer) and his wife, Elena Siesta (née Cora Beatriz Estrugamou), Agraphia set a premium on anonymity and uniqueness of style. The plague of names that issued, interacting and contaminating one another in the journal, attest to the project’s total failure. In the years just after its foundation, Nicasio — in his early forties — had published (beginning in 1958) two books of poems and a book of short stories. He was a model of the elegant porteño — which became almost extinct by the following decade, all those peculiarities of habit and dress swept away like footprints in desert sand. Nicasio’s way of saying “hey”—very rioplatense to any educated ear in any of the districts on either side of the river — resounded in the memory of both his admirers and detractors. Elena Siesta was the author of A Night is the Lifetime of Stars, a title that, according to Urlihrt, incorporates her two main obsessions — stardom and aging — both of them entwined. Nicasio Urlihrt would often say that Elena was a little too Renaissant for a presbyobe, and a little too Pre-Raphaelite for a myope. And as for her nose, on a rounder face it might have looked aquiline, on a more angular face, it might have looked retroussé, but thanks to her ambiguous features, her nose had the better qualities of both. Nonetheless, men tended to fall in love with Elena’s back and nape so as not to commit the error of loving her face. Nicasio indiscriminately circulated his opinion of these paradoxical qualities: “Our first and only love is a vulgar woman,” he used to say, without finishing the quotation: “whose chastity is a myth, and that myth is our life.” Myth and biography never ceased their prolific interbreeding in the whole pitiful history of Agraphia / Alusiva.
6.
— yours isn’t serious
but it is [an] illness.
It’s called kleptolalia
and it has more or less
the same symptomatology
and prognosis as gout,
although it hasn’t got
the stamp of aristocracy.
The reception for Nicasio Urlihrt’s journal, Agraphia, was held in office “A.” We were in the office next door, which Urlihrt leased to his nephew and associates at Agraphia. His nephew was called Alfredo Haedo. His associates: Sergio Blamires and Benjamin Haines: Beehaitchhaitch. And one of the three was the boss. How old was the boss? Same age as I am now. How old was I back then? Same age as my buddy, Gustavo. We’d left military service the year before: eighteen, nineteen. The days when we stayed up until ten, eleven, or even later if one of the employees lost track of the time. When we left, we used to turn off the machines — an Olivetti 24, and an old Remington typewriter with a wide-carriage for the dirty work — a habit the consul’s wife disapproved of, who, one morning or afternoon, passed a comment about her seeing them do the same thing [for those martinets] in police stations.