Spurious - Lars Iyer [0]
Copyright © 2011 by Lars Iyer
All rights reserved
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
mhpbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Iyer, Lars.
Spurious : a novel / Lars Iyer.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-935554-92-9
I. Title.
PR6109.Y47S78 2011
823′.92--dc22
2010038113
v3.1
To Sinéad
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
First Page
I’m a terrible influence on W., everyone says that. Why does he hang out with me? What’s in it for him? The great and the good are shaking their heads. Sometimes W. goes back to the high table and explains himself. I am something to explain, W. says. He has to account for me to everyone. Why is that?
I don’t feel I have to account for myself, W. says, that’s what it is. I’ve no real sense of shame. It must be something to do with my Hinduism, W. muses.—‘You’re an ancient people, but an innocent one, unburdened by shame’, W. says. On the other hand, it could be simply due to my stupidity. I’m freer than him, W. acknowledges, but more stupid. It’s an innocent kind of stupidity, but it’s stupidity nonetheless.
It’s been my great role in his life, W. says, helping him escape the high table. He’s down among the low tables now, he says, in the chimps’ enclosure.
W. remembers when I was up and coming, he tells me. He remembers the questions I used to ask, and how they would resound beneath the vaulted ceilings.—‘You seemed so intelligent then’, he says. I shrug. ‘But when any of us read your work …’, he says, without finishing the sentence.
So was he ever up and coming?, I ask W. He was, he remembers. That was a golden age. Everyone looked up to him. Everything was expected of him! Each morning, he got up and read and took notes until he went to bed. He had a desk and a bed in his room, and his books and his notebooks, but nothing else. He didn’t go out, didn’t drink, but just read and took notes, day after day. What went wrong?—‘Drinking’, he says. ‘I drank too much, I smoked too much’. Why did he drink?—‘The sense of the apocalypse’, W. says. ‘That it was all for nothing’.
W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’
Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’.
‘Something inside you always knew, didn’t it?’, W. says. ‘Didn’t your teachers say as much on your report card: Lars has a stutter, but it doesn’t seem to bother him’? But why was I unbothered?, W. wonders. Did I imagine that my shame should end with the sign of my shame? I wasn’t ashamed of my shame, that’s the point, W. says. My shame didn’t prompt me to thought and reflection. It didn’t make me change my ways.
It’s all down to my non-Catholicism and non-Judaism, W. says. Only for a Jew and a Catholic like himself (W.’s family are converts), is it possible to feel shame about shame.
W. dreams of serious conversation. Not that it would have serious topics, you understand, he says—that it would be concerned, for example, with the great topics of the day.—‘Speech itself would be serious’, he says with great vehemence. That’s what he’s found with the real thinkers he’s known. Everything they say is serious; they’re incapable of being unserious.
Even I become serious when a real thinker is about, W.’s observed. We remember that afternoon in Greenwich when W. was lost in conversation with one such thinker. I was leaning in, trying to listen; I had a sense of the seriousness of the conversation, W. could see it. He was impressed; for once I wasn’t going to ruin it by talking about blowholes