Spinoffs and Clutterbuck

If this blog is Happy Days – and God I wish it was – then Clutterbuck is its Mork and Mindy. Go there. Go there now, and return day after day after happy, happy day.

The Lost Masterpiece Of S.I. Hayakawa

I am convinced that S.I. Hayakawa has written a very great novel.

I discovered S.I. Hayakawa’s masterpiece while browsing idly through The Penguin Guide To Synonyms And Related Words by S.I. Hayakawa. At first, an old joke came to mind (as old jokes do): a man asks his friend what the book is that he’s reading, and the friend replies that it’s called ‘Dictionary’.

“Any good?”

“Well, the plot’s not up to much, but it explains every word as you go along.”

I laughed lightly to myself at the antique drollery. The Penguin Guide To Synonyms And Related Words is indeed a dictionary of sorts: an alphabetic guide to the differences between ‘dissemble’ and ‘disassemble’, and so on.

But then I came across this:

Smoking cigars was the beautiful woman’s only eccentricity.

Did ever Gabriel García Marquez write a more compelling opening line? And here this was, framed between square brackets under the heading IDIOSYNCRASY Oddity Eccentricity Quirk, as if it were nothing more than a learning aid for the semi-literate.

I pressed on.

Later, under IMPLICIT Covert Latent Tacit Unspoken:

By tacit agreement, Clark’s friends all avoided any mention of his mentally ill wife.

Later still:

One might call the woman next door charming, for all her simplicity, but one would think twice about calling her bewitching – unless one lived in a rather unusual neighbourhood.

How could I doubt that I was in the presence of literary greatness? S.I. Hayakawa’s terse prose recalls Hemingway, Carver and Hammett (“He turned towards me and suddenly wielded a short, ugly knife”); he can do bawdy (“She administered the spanking with resolution”), and he can do eclectic (“It is customary for Tibetans to put yak butter in their tea”). At times he is menacing and Kafkaesque: “The officer ordered me to cease my whistling”.

S.I. Hayakawa’s greatest gift is for characterisation. Consider the following pen-portrait:

His refusal to wear a tie at any time is one of my uncle’s most admirable idiosyncrasies.

This rambunctious figure could have stepped from the pages of Chekhov or perhaps early Bellow, surely. What becomes of him?

As he grew older, he took to saving bits of string he found in the street.

And later:

His severe speech impediment made it nearly impossible for him to be understood.

The pathos is unbearable.

The puzzle of S.I. Hayakawa’s novel is, of course, that its sentences are scattered seemingly at random throughout the dense pages of The Penguin Guide To Synonyms And Related Words by S.I. Hayakawa. A most Borgesian prank!

Of course, my duty to posterity required that I appoint myself the executor and amenuensis of S.I. Hayakawa. Within the cold marble block that was The Penguin Guide To Synonyms And Related Words by S.I. Hayakawa a masterpiece was trapped. I meant to free it.

Progress so far is slow but rewarding. The following vignettes have been pieced together from the glimmering potsherds of S.I. Hayakawa’s prose: all I have added is a light seasoning of punctuation. I have no way of knowing, of course, in what order S.I. Hayakawa intended these sentences to be assembled. I simply followed the promptings of artistic necessity. Once you have read these scenes – each as perfect as the daintiest Ottoman miniature – I am sure you will be convinced, as I am, that I could not have done otherwise.     

Here, a housewife recalls an unseemly encounter with a eccentric tradesman:

“We called in an artisan to restore the broken pane in our Tiffany shade. He was the most unbelievable boozer I ever saw. He could down six straight shorts and never bat an eye. He used his walking stick to smash the repellent art object.”

A domestic squabble straight out of fifties melodrama – one can almost taste the sour Martini:

“Wednesday, 1 July has been named the date for the annual office dinner.”

“Some people spend hours before a mirror feeding their vanity, but is that any worse than your tedious concern with office protocol simply as a way of insuring your own self-importance?”

“Yes,” was his taciturn answer to the complex question posed.

A dark and disturbing encounter, fraught with sexual tension:

There was an odour of fear in the air. The girl shied away from looking the strange man in the eye.

“When the breasts begin to develop, girls are well on their way to maturing into young women.”

She was beginning to be dubious about the man’s claim to be a qualified chartered accountant.

A satirical skit; I’m reminded of Vonnegut:

He reached out, grasped my hand, and shook it vigorously.

“Don’t be formal; call me Joe.”

Successful politicians tend to be on a first-name basis with hundreds of miscellaneous people.

More domestic tension:

The couple liked to ramble about the ancient ruins in search of a secluded picnic spot.

“Picnics are fun.”

He spoke with evident sarcasm.

And these, I feel sure, were meant to be the closing lines of S.I. Hayakawa’s lost masterpiece:

He was obsessed by fear of contracting AIDS.

Guided by the knowledge that he had only a year to live, he sold his business and went to live in Provence.

I will have to stop writing now, as I have tears in my eyes. The work goes on.

Other Stuff

It’s high time I said some words in praise of Other Stuff, the spin-off from a spin-off from the Guardian blog: it’s a happy(if occasionally cat-centric) home for poetry, drawings, photography, and all sorts of other good things.

Particular favourites: Zephirine’s poems, Beyond the Pale’s dragonflies, and these elephants. Zeph is also the able curatrix of the site; Beyond the Pale is also this guy.

A nice place to explore. And there’s a little snippet of my stuff there too.

Alarming Nabokov news

I know posting four times (frice?) in one day is a bit undignified, but this can’t wait. I was leafing through Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions just now and I came upon THIS:

“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

So, not only did Nabokov – whom I love more than I love anyone other than Steve Harmison of Durham and England – predict the smiley, he approved it. I just don’t know what the hell to make of that. LOL, Vladimir, LOL!!?!