You must have been up at Cambridge with Methuselah Soames," people say to me, even in the depths of the P?rigord. They are often retired professionals with very nice intentions and, in not a few cases, dark blue Volvos. If I am in a yielding mood, I own the soft impeachment: I may have been (all right, I was) at the same college as Methuselah, but he always moved in a different, more exalted, Apostolic world than I. True, for one bright season we trod the West End boards together in a wickedly impertinent undergraduate revue. But even then, he was the unmistakable comet; the rest of us were but a train of concomitant dross, sparkling with reflected glory.
Witless watchers, who saw no further than the ends of their own ambitions, were sure that Methuselah would soon be assumed as a fixed star in the artistic firmament. How could they fail to see that he had the makings of a constellation? No wise man, however, could predict in what illustrious form he would choose ultimately to reveal himself. In the chaste 1950s, no throne seemed quite ample enough. Literary editor? Chief producer (Talks)? Curator of the National Gallery? Brains Truster? Professor, but of what, and-in those narrow days-where? The University of East Anglia, the National Theatre and Channel 4 had yet to be invented, although we did already have the wheel.
Methuselah had so many gifts, such prehensile insights, such oscillating purposes, that his genius lay precisely in his lack of precision. "The centre of certain circles," I once heard him lecture a Nobel prize winner, "lies in a variety of places on their circumference." Parody and paradox marched in step for him. From time to time, they twinkled into skittish dance. An intellectual Fred 'n' Ginger, Methuselah's solos could also be pas de deux.
He was reluctant to declare whether it was literature, the stage (ballet, opera, drama, tutti assiemi?), the epic mural, the lecture room, film (forget crass movies) or the imminent world of mass media that he would make entirely his own. His modesty was the result neither of doubt nor of indecision. Should, could one ask a chameleon to come out in his true colours? Methuselah's quotidian appearance declared his versatility. The jeans, top and bottom, owed allegiance to Bohemia; the bare feet remembered the plight of the sans chaussures; the raven curls indicated that the great god Pan was redivivus; his stammer-Methuselah had so much of significance to say that words jostled, and sometimes jammed, in the only exit available to them-argued for freedom of speech in the tones of an erudition which he never for one moment concealed or abated. His eloquent hands made distinct Wittgensteinian boxes for the sentiments his lips delivered wholesale.
Methuselah's father, he let it be rumoured, had gone to the devil as a young man but had returned, as the result of who knows what negotiated resurrection, to practise, briefly, at the Bar to which it was his son's pious promise to be called. It was possible that our most brilliant contemporary would jilt the Muses to sit literally in judgement over the rest of us.
By the time that we were both down from Cambridge and I was writing novels in a basement in Chelsea, our roads were already divergent; his high, mine low. Methuselah's precociousness was as smartly applauded as his father's, in his fin-de-si?cle day, had been notoriously scorned. But if revenge was sweet, it was by no means to be his main course. Still in his early twenties, Methuselah devilled by day, for a plump QC in the chancy Chancery Division. By night, he often dined, candle-lit, with a scandal-hit princess who, the toadies croaked, solicited from him an insolence of style which would have led her to banish another from her table. Who has not heard the story that when she proposed marriage, he told her that she was beneath him? Some even say that, at the time, it was literally true. Such is the state of our journalism that these things are both reported and believed.
Methuselah's brilliance flashed like a short circuit in the Inns of Court. His master, Brinsley Banks, who had never been in the first rustle of silks, was suddenly winning more cases than he lost. As Methuselah's diligence informed Banks's arguments and the prodigy's marginal glosses embellished his oratory, BB began to speak of himself-his favourite topic-as a future Lord Chief.
The precocious Methuselah's renown in mid-century London was so great as to be stultifying. Already the rest of us knew that we could contend only for second place in the history of our generation. Even Noel Annan had to concede that there was a boyish intellect younger than he was. Is it shameful to admit that I wished that Methuselah would soon take his finals and devote himself exclusively to the law? It was comfortable, if cowardly, to imagine his genius modernising British justice rather than bestriding the world of the arts where he would throw the rest of us into permanent shadow.
But at five o'clock one afternoon, I was amazed, and flattered, when our licorice-black telephone rang and I heard "M-m-m-methuselah here."
He wondered if we could meet.
"Why not?" I said. "We're not parallel lines." My facetiousness was a callow symptom of a sense of election at hearing from so bright a star.
"P-p-parallel lines," he said, "meet frequently, at Sh-sh-schmidts's. Sh-sh-shall we do the same?"
His smallest trumps won tricks.
Schmidt's was a Viennese-style lunch place, in Charlotte Street, where young publishers fed angry young men at three and sixpence a head. It was tactful of Methuselah, I thought, to choose somewhere within my means. The purpose of our meeting was not, at first, evident; over his Nachspeise, he told me that he had had an invitation to go to Germany, where the arts were properly appreciated, and funded. He had been asked to stage the Ring cycle, as a musical, in a Brechtian decor recalling Albert Speer, Leni Riefenstahl and the Bauhaus.
"Eclectic of you," I said.
"Eclectic is what one chooses to make it," he said. "You've written a novel, am I right?"
"I've written two," I said. It sounded like a confession of failure.
"I mean to write one," he said. It sounded like a promise of triumph.
"What about?" I said.
"About? You're joking."
"Am I? Monsieur Jourdain and I."
"What is the only thing worth doing today?" Methuselah said.
"Ah!" I said.
"Precisely."
"And you mean to do it?"
"Or not to do it," Methuselah said. "Or not to do it."
"Two possibilities there," I said. "Not counting their synthesis."
"You know your trouble?" he said. "Hope."
"Ah," I said. "Of course. In what sense?"
"You hope for... promotion. I don't."
"You can't go much higher," I said, "can you? Without encountering respiratory difficulties."
"I have no desire to please anyone," he said. "One either creates a masterpiece or... one does not belong in the arts."
"Cyril Connolly," I said.
"Yesterday's man," he said, "Tr-tr-transcendence or n-n-nothing. What is a novel exactly? Can you tell me? It is a dead form," he said, "which must be brought to life or left to rot. But how?"
"Do I have guesses?"
"By not writing it," he said. "By not writing it."
"You've evidently cracked it," I said. "It remains only not to do it."
"The age of the primary text is past," he said, leaping decades ahead of contemporary thought. "I mean to be the first novelist of-no, under-the meta-text. Subjacence is all. I am going to be the author of... presumably you've guessed. An unwritten masterpiece. Not unknown, c'est d?j? fait, ?a!-you may even have done it yourself-but a masterpiece which cannot ever be criticised, cannot be outmoded, cannot lose its ?lan because it exists, in full, and there as a variorum edition of limitless layers, only in the creator's mind. Immune from readers, it will never age, can never be copied, never conceivably disclose its recherch?es riches."
"God!"
"In a word. Only in this way can the artist be emancipated from criticism and abide forever above, below, and all around those who seek to decrypt him. There will not be even a vestige of my work in the vulgar, linear mode. As an author, I shall be to literature what reality is to appearance, what white is to the spectrum, say."
"What white is to the spectrum."
"You're right. They will guess, and may even carp, as we do at Creation, without being able to say how it was done or what its complexities are. I shall escape exegesis, although not-of course-envy."
"Of course not," I said. I was already envious myself.
"I am going to be, to embody, my own creation; the man and the work are one. Natura naturans."
"Nicht wahr?" I said. One did at Schmidt's.
"As your own harmless novels reveal..."
Ah, the stiletto of friendly candour, how it pierces!
"... there is no printed narrative that has not been bettered, no grubby trail of linear print that can ever be wholly free of the second-hand, as great art must. We live in a time of obese satieties, of systematic superfluities, in which every form has been thoroughly used, and abused. Besides, we have more m-m-masterpieces than diligence can scan or f-f-f-fingers count."
"Leaving us where?" I said.
"Apogee and nadir," he said. "Ars est necare artem."
"Art is at its end, you mean?"
"Nothing has not been done," he said. "And that is what I mean to do."
Before I could gasp, let alone suggest that we split the bill, he had slipped away silently on those famous bare feet. As I walked home, empty-pocketed, to our Chelsea basement, I wondered why I had been honoured with Methuselah's confidence; he could as well have declared himself to Noel or Peter or Isaiah or the other, famous, Freddie. All were his familiars. I came to the humiliating realisation that he had chosen me as the witness to his unique project because I have just enough wit to understand his genius and not enough nerve to emulate it.
If I imagined, with silly sentimentality, that Methuselah might, from time to time, or decade to decade, renew contact with me, I underrated his economy of style. His absence from my life was the contact he had with me. Damn him to hell, he knew it. As my hair greyed and began to fall, I was always more conscious of what Methuselah had not done than even of the overt achievements of our epoch which dwarfed me daily as prizes fell, like leaves in Vallombrosa, first on my contemporaries and then on my juniors. As I soldiered on in my own unlaurelled way, I was all the while aware of the miglior fabbro who was doing nothing and would never be forgotten for it.
Methuselah had taken his Bar finals, and with the greatest possible distinction, but he neither practised nor pleaded. It was said that he sometimes consented to play the part of Mycroft Holmes and, without stirring from his, or another's, bed would offer speculative advice which trumped the pundits. One scorching parenthesis turned the Master of the Rolls into toast. Of course, Methuselah did other things-an opera, a motor-cycle manual, a philosophical pop-up book which, controversially, featured Lady Ottoline Morrell-but I knew that what he was not doing was what he was really doing. His novel, I imagined, was growing, thickening, coiling on itself, inside the head which bore its secret, ramified, impacted, unpublished volumes.
For some reason, I kept the secret of Methuselah's endeavours, less from a sense of honour than because I liked to think that it preserved a link between us. Cf. Lear and his fool!
Two thirds of a lifetime went by and then, one day, earlier this year, the fax began to susurrate and a white tongue of curling paper came stammering into my hand. The complete text read: "Come to the Reading Room, the British Museum, 3rd June 1997, 3 pm to meet my father. Methuselah."
What could be more typical than for summons and invitation to be one? I told myself that I should not go; and went. I confess that I am a London Library man myself; the BM Reading Room baffles and intimidates me. I was not sure whether it was where it had always been, wherever that was, or somewhere else, wherever that might be. I will not embarrass the reader with the tale of panicky traipses past mummy cases and filched grey marbles. I walked; I ran; I resigned; I panicked; finally my dishevelled appearance won me entrance to the domed edifice where Methuselah was waiting in fretful tolerance.
"You've missed him," he said.
"It's only eight minutes past," I said. "You didn't stipulate punctuality.
"He could only stay a minute."
"He must be very old," I said.
"Longevity is something one has to live with," Methuselah said.
"Why did you want me to meet your father?" I said.
"I didn't," Methuselah said, "particularly. He liked something you did. I can't remember what exactly. He's slightly gaga these days."
"We're none of us getting any younger," I said. "You're not getting any older either, by the look of you, but shouldn't you think of, well, putting down a marker?"
"Meaning what?"
"The novel," I said. "Isn't your head a rather fragile receptacle for it?"
"You have understood nothing," he said.
"And it takes some doing," I said. "Your father wasn't really here, was he?"
"I'm going to bring something out," he said, "in the form of an avant-propos. On the stroke of the millennium. You've written how many novels now?"
"Avant-propos be damned," I said. "At least my books exist."
"At most," he said. "Where, do you suppose, will you rate in the literary histories of a century from now?"
"There won't be any," I said. "There will only be video games."
"Life is a video game," he said. "Come with me. I want to show you something."
"Not the cities of the plain by any chance?"
"Your references are no longer taken, you know; what you think of as allusive wit is a frantic tug at a bell that no longer rings. Come with me."
He led me out of the crepuscular light of the Reading Room through a door labelled Absolutely No Entry. We went into a sheeted lobby, where who knows what furtive treasures waited reclamation by aggrieved parties, and up a flight of narrow, bright steps. It was as if some furnace glowered down at us. I winced at its heat, but Methuselah skipped ahead in panic glee until we reached an upper gallery and came to a door labelled The Future. Methuselah had the key, God knows how, and in we went. The huge room contained neither stacks nor catalogues. There were no stalls for scholars but little booths, with screens.
I looked for buttons or knobs or unintelligible instructions, but there were none. Methuselah walked up to a screen and, with his usual consummate confidence, merely said, "3rd June 2097, gissit."
There was a rustling noise and the word "Deal" appeared in front of us.
"Literature. Methuselah Soames. Gissit."
The same brief rustling followed and there was one single title: Nothing, by Methuselah Soames, frstpub. 1.1.2000."
"Sales before publication. Gissit."
"Eight. Million."
"Specimen page. Gissit."
The screen went blank.
"You've stumped it," I said.
"Random pages display for my friend. Gissit."
The pages riffled past my eyes. All were blank.
"Avant-propos," I said.
"Critical attention. Gissit."
"Specify media."
"Academic journals. Gissit."
A flurry of titles filled the screen and filed past like the names of the dead on a war memorial.
"Media coverage. Gissit."
An equally endless scroll of solemn sources and awestruck authors jerked past my eyes.
"Do you want to know what became of you?" Methuselah said.
Of course I didn't. "Of course I do," I said.
He hyphenated my name with Gissit. There was a little burpy pause.
"Works in print. Gissit."
"Negative."
"Mentions in lit.hist. Gissit."
"One ref.," the computer said. "Listed at university with Methuselah Soames."
"You devil," I said, "aren't you?"
"Nothing to it," he said. And suddenly, I was alone again, in the lustreless present and could, of course, remember nothing of what I had seen and heard.
