Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [27]
“He locks these fellows up—not the delegation, mind you, but his own cabinet… That must have been the original meaning of cabinet. People you put away in a wooden locker, ha ha ha! You had such a winner and you didn’t put it in your rag the very next morning, Ikem. I’m surprised at you.”
“NTBB” replies Ikem. “Not To Be Broadcast,” he adds dispelling the puzzlement in a few faces. The girls and Mad Medico laugh. Dick still looks puzzled.
“I don’t see the connection,” he says.
“Between what?”
“The delegation from this desert place and the cabinet.”
I am going to explain again but Mad Medico has a better explanation and drowns me out.
“That’s a Britisher for you, Chris. He is looking for connections. There aren’t any, young man. This is negritude country, not Devonshire.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” I say. “We are no more illogical in these parts than any other people, yourselves included.” There is perhaps more shrillness in my voice than is required.
“Come! Come!” says Dick in a most offensively patronizing tone. “John is only joking.”
“You see what I mean,” says Mad Medico before I can claim to be joking too. “No sense of humour left. None whatsoever. They are all so stiff and damned patriotic, so quick to take offence. You can’t make a joke here if you are white. You should have heard the names they called me because I was so naive as to try to cheer up some dreary wards in their blasted hospital. Imperialist! White racist! Red Neck! The best though was Negrophobist. Do you know that one? I didn’t. Negrophobist. Apparently the opposite of nigger-lover.”
“Let’s face it, MM,” (I am now really irritated) “would you have put up those jokes of yours in an English hospital?”
“Of course I wouldn’t. Never said I would. But the English are not supposed to have a sense of humour to begin with. And this is not England, is it? Look outside. What do you see? Sunshine! Life! Vitality. It says to you: Come out and play. Make love! Live! And these dusky imitators of petit bourgeois Europe corrupted at Sandhurst and London School of Economics expect me to come here and walk about in a bowler hat and rolled umbrella like a fucking banker on Cheapside. Christ!”
We all laugh and applaud the brief oration. Except Dick. He is watching intently as Mad Medico perspiring refreshes his glass with campari and soda, drops in two ice cubes and licks his fingers.
Dick, it turns out, is the founding editor of a new poetry magazine in Soho called Reject. Prompted by Mad Medico he tells the story, at first reluctantly and in instalments of one sentence or two a piece.
“How did it begin? I am sure Ikem will be interested to hear.”
“Oh, simply by placing advertisements in well-known literary journals calling for manuscripts rejected by other poetry magazines. Simple.”
“That was three years ago?”
“Well, almost four.”
“And it caught on?”
“Our success was immediate and total.”
From now something like animation begins to enter his voice. The expression on his face changes too. At first it looks like a sneer but is presumably his own way of pride. He is now more open-handed with information. “In under two years we exploded the pretensions of the poetry establishment and their stuffy party organs. It was the most significant development in British poetry since the war.”
The group gradually splits in two: Ikem and the editor at one end of the bar with Elewa sticking to them, understanding little; and Mad Medico joining Beatrice and me.
“I am sorry to tell you this,” MM says to Beatrice, “but you waited five years too late to meet Chris. He and Sam were much nicer people then.”
“Who wasn’t? But five years ago BB was below the legal age and would have been of limited interest to me.”
“I beg your pardon,” she says.
“Really, they were such fun then, he and Sam,” says MM almost to himself. He stirs the tiny iceberg floating in his Scotch with his index finger. A touch of genuine wistfulness has come into his voice. And his eyes.
“You know, MM,” I say, “you are the only person in this country