But even this search for myself in an Other had been anticipated by Cendrars. In his endnotes to Moravagine he writes:
I don’t believe there are any literary subjects, or rather that there is only one: man.
But which man? The man who writes, of course. There is no other subject possible.
Who is he? In any event it’s not me, it is the Other. “I am the Other,” Gérard de Nerval writes under one of the very rare photographs of himself.
But who is this other?
It doesn’t much matter. You meet someone by chance and never see him again. One fine day this guy resurfaces in your consciousness and screws you about for ten years. It’s not always someone memorable; he can be colorless and without character.
This is what happened to me with Mister X—Moravagine. I wanted to start writing. He had taken my place. He was there, installed deep down in me, as in an armchair. I shook him, struggled with him, he didn’t want to trade places.
He seemed to say, “I’m here and here I stay!” It was terrible. I began to notice that this Other was appropriating everything that had happened in my life, assuming character traits I thought of as mine. My thoughts, my favorite studies, my tastes, everything converged on him, belonged to him, nourished him. At great cost to myself, I fed and reared a parasite. In the end I no longer knew which of us was copying the other. He took trips in my place. He made love instead of me. But he never possessed any real identity, for each of us was himself, me and the Other. Tragic tête-a-tête.
Which is why one can write but one book, or the same book again and again. It’s why all good books are alike.
They are all autobiographical. It’s why there is only one literary subject: man.
It’s why there is only one literature: that of this man, this Other, the one who writes.
FIVE
A Typewriter Collecting Dust
I CAME BACK TO NEW ZEALAND FROM the Congo in the same frame of mind in which my literary heroes returned from their excursions to the ends of the earth—impatient to get away again. My plan was to pay my parents the money I owed them for my fare home then go to Vietnam as a war correspondent. That was before I met Pauline. At first, I was caught between the Scylla of being utterly free and the Charybdis of losing myself in love. Yet I knew from the moment I set eyes on her which imperative would win out. I recalled hitchhiking south of the Congolese border a week before Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and the refusal of the Southern Rhodesian immigration officials to allow me to cross the Zambezi.
With my passport now bearing a stamp that gave me seven days to leave Northern Rhodesia, I began my long trek back to the Congo. For hours on end I sat in the dissembling shade of an acacia, waiting for a car to pass. The sun beat down. I was parched. Nothing moved in the stony landscape. I picked up a pebble and made it a talisman. Days later, in the last town before the border, looking for something to read, I bought a copy of Rider Haggard’s She in a local dairy. It nourished the idea that had taken root in my mind, that I was destined to meet someone who would change my life. Despite my many moves by plane, by train, or on foot, from the Congo to France, France to England, England to Greece, I kept the pebble and the book, and showed them to Pauline a few days after we met. I don’t think she believed in omens, and she was appalled that I should identify her with the mysterious white queen, Ayesha, the all-powerful “She who must be obeyed,” but the spirit of my story held true.
I took work as a relief teacher in a Wairarapa high school, hitchhiking back to Wellington every Friday to spend the weekend with Pauline. In my free time during the week, I tried to write. Poems about the Congo.1 An essay on the Congolese painter, Albert Nkusu. An occasional piece of journalism, or a translation of something by Blaise Cendrars.2 But I could make nothing substantial of these fragments, and confessed my frustration to my old mentor, Herman Gladwin.
Herman immediately threw three questions at me. “What is your aim in writing? Have you anything to say? Do you want to build or destroy?”
Feebly, I asked what he meant by “destroy.” “Masturbating,” he said. “Feeling sorry for yourself. Wishing you were somewhere else, or someone else.”
I recalled the fin-de-siècle Viennese poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal whose “Letter to Lord Chandos” describes the despair of a writer who has become so disenchanted with language that he can longer write. In the late 1960s, something akin to Von Hofmannsthal’s “inexplicable condition” afflicted me. At first I suspected that my inability to write stemmed from a disenchantment with language that would only deepen in the years to come—a doubt that words could ever capture or convey a sense of the life one lived or the world one lived in but would only gesture pathetically and longingly toward experiences that remained forever beyond one’s grasp. Most writers are all too familiar with the sense of disillusionment and disgust that overwhelms them when they return to passages that they believed to have captured the vitality of an event only to find no trace of what had been so vividly in mind during the act of writing. Some, like T. S. Eliot, have likened the poet’s “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”3 to the existential plight of humanity, waiting for God to reveal Himself, to illuminate the dark cold and the empty desolation4 of life on earth. The fictitious Lord Chandos, whose “inner stagnation” imposed on him “a life of barely believable vacuity,” admits to being able to keep his despair from his wife and servants, going about his business as if nothing untoward had occurred, “rebuilding a wing of his house” and “conversing occasionally with the architect.” But I was not sure how long I could pretend that I had not lost my way in Dante’s selva oscura.
That summer, I rented a house in the Wairarapa, and when Pauline had finished her exams in Wellington, she came to live with me.
The paddocks were dry, divided by dark green shelterbelts. The heat shimmered above the road, distorting the landscape as if it were behind molten glass.
Late one afternoon, we drove to the Tauherenikau River in a borrowed car. After swimming, we threw ourselves down in the long grass. Fantails flickered in the manuka. Red commas of flax flowers punctuated the bush. I confessed that I could not live with the thought that I could not write. Pauline consoled me with the words of Trollope. “They are most happy who have no story to tell.” She reminded me of the stories we don’t have a hand in making. How they affect us more deeply than the stories we tell ourselves.
I was not consoled. It would take me years to realize that writing must be allowed to come to us, like life itself, and not be hassled into answering our summons. And yet an immense happiness flooded through me in that arid landscape, dusk already falling on the ranges, the river out of earshot and the moon rising. I was in love. The past had no hold on me. There was nothing outside that moment.
When we returned to the car, the dark green world of night birds and foliage was tinged with the spilled milk of the moon. Pauline said she would like to walk into the night, to sleep under the stars, bathed by the moon.
“Bitten by mosquitoes,” I added.
I drove slowly along the darkened road. Once, our headlights startled a rabbit that bolted ahead before swerving suddenly into the grass.
I knew now that if I were to become a writer I would need something real to write about. My essay on Nkusu failed because I had known him only in passing. Like my other Congolese sketches, it went nowhere because the experiences that inspired it were fugitive and fragmentary.
I became convinced that ethnography would provide the depth of engagement that I had sought, but not found, in the Congo. Ethnography would give me a pretext for returning to Africa. It would give me the raw material with which to write. My “spoils,” as Conrad put it. In the meantime, I would turn to translation. I would attach myself to Blaise Cendrars as he had attached himself to Moravagine. “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”5 And I would begin by writing about not being able to write and the reasons why a writer might voluntarily desist from writing and prefer silence.
In