Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberlessDearest, the shadows I live with are numberlessLittle white flowers will never awaken youNot where the black coach of sorrow has taken youAngels have no thoughts of ever returning youWould they be angry if I thought of joining you?Gloomy Sunday.
And I see the drawing room in its entirety, the big Kazak rug, faded reds and yellowed greens on the black-painted floorboards, the shelves of books, the framed Japanese fans, the Art Deco dressing table. You had another in the bedroom; this one was more of a display unit for your collection of scent bottles. I hadn’t known, when I bought you the L’Air du Temps bottle, that you were a collector, and it pleases me to see its pair of intertwining doves here now, even if perhaps you only brought it out because you knew I was coming. Either way, you had me in mind. On the dressing table you’ve arrayed bottles of cut glass and blown glass and marble-swirl glass and opalescent milk glass and Limoges porcelain and rose quartz and green opaline, square-shouldered bottles and round bottles and cylindrical bottles, bottles with stoppers of ruby glass and silver and guilloche enamel and diamond-faceted glass, stoppers in the shape of lilies and roses and pineapples, bottles shaped like pineapples and translucent pears and apples. Here is an especially beautiful one, with a reverse-painted Japanese scene showing two boys playing hide-and-seek. There are bottles shaped like domes and spires and cupolas, ranged like the buildings of a city reflected in the triptych mirror of the dressing table, glowing and winking in the firelight. Then there are the accessories, the atomizers with beaded bulbs and the hairbrushes with tortoiseshell backs, the enamelled powder compacts. I asked you what drove you to collect these things, and you said, Because they’re beautiful, and as I write these words I think of my own collection.
I open the pen cabinet in my mind’s eye to see the pens like jewels, no two of them alike, the Conway Stewarts in casings of Teal Blue with Green Veins, Blue Cracked Ice, Autumn Leaves, Peacock, Grey Jazz, Candy-stripe Relief, Red Jazz, Blue Jazz, Blue Rock Face, Moss Agate, Pink Moiré, and Salmon Pink with Grey-green Flecks, to name but some.
I have a tray of Pelikans, like German burghers in their uniforms of black tops and trouser-barrels of striped green, brown and blue and grey, and the long Pelikan beak-shaped clip sitting against the black top like a gold tie with an upturned tip. I have a block of Parker Vacumatics in silver blues and greys, and if you stand them on end they look like skyscrapers at night with patterned strips of lit windows. I have a sheaf of Sheaffers and a quiverful of Swans and Blackbirds.
I’m writing this with an Onoto, which I chose because its Tiger’s Eye pattern of iridescent tawny browns and ambers matches the back of a hairbrush on your dressing-table. I got it from Beringer when I was starting off collecting, one of the first pens I bought. Lovely thing, Mr Gabriel, attractive name too, said Beringer, Japanese, wouldn’t you think? But no, English as Brighton rock. Made by Thomas De La Rue and Company, London, best printers in the world, Queen Victoria grants them a licence to print the stamps of the Empire. Immensely wealthy. Literally printed money. Banknotes, run your fingers over them, you can feel the engraving. Made diaries, too, stationery, playing cards, that kind of thing. It’s 1905, they decide to make pens. Fountain pens a new-fangled thing, expanding market. Logical step. So they look around for a new angle, most fountain pens were what they call eyedroppers, you had to unscrew them and fill them with an eyedropper. Messy business. So they get hold of this inventor chap, George Sweetser, comes up with a patent for a plunger mechanism, piston if you like, steam engine technology — here, I’ll show you — and Beringer showed me how to unscrew the blind cap on the end of the barrel and pull out the plunger. Funny thing is, said Beringer, you push it in, it fills on the downstroke, not what you’d expect. Vacuum system, ingenious. Opposite of a syringe. And of course you use ink instead of blood. You won’t be going signing your name in blood, Mr Gabriel? Funny thing about Sweetser, too, he was a roller-skating champion, did a music-hall act dressed up as a woman. If you made it up people wouldn’t believe you. Anyway, 1905, they buy Sweetser’s plunger pen. The same year, Battle of Tsushima, Admiral Togo blows the Russian fleet out of the water. End of Russo-Japanese War. So De La Rue thinks, fair play, better keep in with the Land of the Rising Sun, British interests in the Pacific, don’t you know. So they call the pen Onoto, Japanese ring to it. They have a sun logo on some of their pens, not this one. Here’s a thing — he rummaged under the counter — novel by Onoto Watanna, real name Winnifred Eaton, English father, Chinese mother, born in Canada. Dresses herself up in kimonos, does the whole Japanese thing, Americans think she is Japanese. He proffered me the book. The Heart of Hyacinth, he said,1903, not that rare mind you, they printed a couple of hundred thousand, and not great literature, to tell you the truth, but a big hit in its day, and a nice genre piece. Lovely illustrations, I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw it in with the pen. Two Onotos for the price of one. Oh yes, said Beringer, the pen’s a 1948 model. Year that you were born, if my memory serves me right. It does, I said.
So here I am in Eglantine Avenue in 1982, the 1950 Lalique bottle with the intertwining doves is on your drawing-room dressing table, and the hi-fi is playing ‘Gloomy Sunday’. They called it ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’, you said. Two Hungarians wrote the original, Rezso Seress the music, Laszlo Javor the lyrics, in, oh, 1933. The story goes that after it came out there was a spate of suicides among young lovers in Hungary. They’d find them dead in their apartment or whatever, empty syringe beside them, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ on the record player. Or the neighbours hear gunshots and when they burst in the record is still playing. Or the lovers leave a suicide note with ‘Gloomy Sunday’ written on it, nothing else. Well, it’s the Depression after all, and Hungary’s got the highest rate of suicide in the world, the song is in the air, so maybe there’s some truth in the story. Then an English version came out in the States, about 1936, and the same thing began to happen, so they say, lovers killing themselves all over the place. They say they banned it from the airwaves, the BBC banned it, but no one seems to have been able to come up with any hard evidence. They say this, they say that. Maybe the whole thing’s an urban myth. All we can be sure of, Seress jumped to his death from his apartment block in 1968. That’s, what, thirty-five years later, very delayed reaction, I would have said. As you spoke, I thought of Andy Warhol’s images of suicides, one in particular where the victim looks asleep amid the sculpted marble drapery of a baroque tomb; but when we look closer, we find her bed is the crumpled metal sheet of the car roof she has landed on. Yet she seems to have found some repose and grace, as if Divine mercy has been shown.
Soon there’ll be candles and prayers that are sad, I knowLet them not weep, let them know that I’m glad to go …
Funny thing is, you went on, the English lyrics are nothing like the Hungarian. Not that my Hungarian is up to much, but I came across a translation once, oh, something like, it is autumn and the leaves are falling, all love has died on earth, people are heartless and wicked, there are dead people on the streets everywhere, that kind of thing. Billie’s version came out in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor. Not the happiest of times, in any event. And they say that Billie’s third verse was an afterthought, a kind of palliative to lighten the gloom of the first two.