‘Mainly you’d be cold,’ says Max.
Hans and Max are again walking past Bacchus and his nymphs, a large bronze, the god, pot-belly to the fore, riding his donkey, lithe Maenads writhing around Bacchus, one has fallen flat on her back, arms and legs pointing in all directions, Hans stops:
‘It’s not as vivid as Flaubert.’
‘True, but they’re highly sexed, he’s rather a fright but they’re trying to do all sorts to him.’
They move off, walk down the steps leading to the middle of the gardens, take a turn around the boating pond, a little boy is crying, his boat has got trapped in the middle of the pond, at the base of the fountain, where the wind does not reach, where the falling water creates a gentle vortex, where sails droop; the boat cannot escape, its fate is certain, it’s doomed, the little boy’s mother tells him, serves him right, what he deserves, else they’ll come and pinch it off of him, so stop that row, you’re a big boy now, the mother gives the boy a slap on the hand.
Two weeks ago all the boats on the lake were stolen, for a laugh, vandals broke into the shed in the central avenue, the whole flotilla was found a week later, nonetheless, a boat can vanish, especially a sailing boat, the boy who’s crying knows a legend about a boat that vanished, it’s what is about to happen to his boat now, it will disappear beneath the central fountain, answering the call of all the sailing boats which have already disappeared down all the years, it will go to join them on the great ocean, an armada of sailing boats on the mighty main, the boy will command his boat, next in line to the admiral’s ship, huge waves, captains courageous, he looks up towards the façade of the Senate.
Waves as high as buildings, the ships do battle with the storm, the last battle, but the man who owns the sailing boats and his assistant come with a thin rope which they hold across the pond, they loop the rope over the mast of the foundering sailing boat, haul it into more navigable waters, the wind blowing over the surface of the small pond can now swell the sails, the sun laughs in the playing fountain, the child has to go, no, you can’t have another turn, you do it on purpose, you do it every time I’m nice, never content, you always manage to blame me and cry, you were told one turn, a turn is a quarter of an hour, not longer, you agreed, and now you’re crying, you’re a naughty boy, every time I let you have your way you take advantage and ask for something else and start crying, if you don’t stop you’ll never get anything ever again!
Hans would have liked Max to let him tell at least part of the love scene between Thomas and Hélène, he’s cross with Max for having beaten him to it:
‘A scene on the steamy side, Max, you’ve taken the best bit! I long to write something like that.’
‘It won’t be published.’
‘But you’ll let me read the scene you’ve written?’
‘No,’ says Max, ‘I had the nerve to put it down on paper but I wouldn’t dare let anyone read it, I’m afraid of what they would say.’
‘If you wrote it, it means that you did meet a woman.’
‘You know how it works, the only assignation you have is with your reader.’
And Max explains to Hans that he finds it hard to face the public, to abandon the public he imagines while he’s writing and face the real public, he has a very complicated notion of the public, obviously he has a number of imaginary allies who accompany his every sentence, but always looming before him, on his right, is someone who keeps an eye on him and never approves of anything he writes, and someone sitting in front of him, who cannot read the sentence Max is writing but seems to know it even as it is being written, it seems as if it is being written in the head of this person at the same time as it is being written on Max’s page and the sentence brings a smile to the face of this faceless person, a smile which is unbearably knowing, it isn’t a friendly reader who might say I can hear too many iambic pentameters in that clause, too much blank verse, too many things that are self-evident, do you really want to say that the milkman came at ten past five? No, the person who sits opposite Max and smiles is a person who is ready to deride everything Max thinks particularly fine in his writing.
Not a person as kindly disposed as the Hans who warned him he was perilously close to melodrama, not someone meticulous like his boss François Mérien, who told him this sentence lacks rhythm, take out a verb here, put a full stop there, no, someone who doesn’t need Max’s book but in Max’s mind is nevertheless a person of some importance, a person who smiles when he says:
‘Does this serve a useful purpose?’
Max hasn’t called this faceless face names as he most assuredly would if he were dealing with some stupid critic, the blank face is that of both the public he needs to win over and the public which will never be won over, the public which Max masters for all its peevish ill-temper and its ideas about what a proper novel should be, the public which is there every time Max removes or amends a word and whispers in his ear:
‘Surely you don’t think you can get away with just doing that?’
The loathsome, indispensable public with its insane and insatiable demand for nebulous quality, everything that makes Max feel furious with himself for not responding to the madness that is his, and angry also with this public which asks so much of him, he has finally grown to resent everyone who constitutes the real public, people like him, his contemporaries, everyone, every phrase becomes a cage and he resents all the people he invites to watch him in his cage, he feels he’d like to stuff their heads down a lavatory pan.
He begins to hate people who never did anything to him, simply because he himself admits he’s no good at anything, and sometimes Max turns pragmatic, holds forth, what comes closest to it in tone is the small, shrill voice of the modish journalist, a touch limp-wristed, a touch corrupt.