Mitchell A Circle of Friends

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30417-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten

Julian Mitchell's fifth novel, first published in 1966, is the story of Martin Bannister, whose lonely bachelor life in Manhattan is transformed by a meeting with desirable redhead Henrietta Grigson and her husband Freddy, with whom he embarks on a heady social whirl. But Martin has a surprise in store - a plot twist the real-life inspiration for which Julian Mitchell divulges in his new preface to this Faber Finds edition. 'A comedy that is delightfully human, played by characters who have the edgy vitality of real life.'Evening Standard 'Mitchell is a writer of the most supple technical accomplishment.' Telegraph 'Ingeniously constructed and excellently written.' Listener

Julian Mitchell (b. 1935), is an English playwright, screenwriter and occasional novelist. He is best known as the writer of the play and film Another Country, and as a screenwriter for TV, producing many original plays and series episodes, including at least ten for Inspector Morse. Born in Epping, Essex, and educated at Winchester College and Oxford, he would publish six novels in the 1960s (all of them since reissued in Faber Finds) including the prizewinning The White Father (1964), before shifting his focus to theatre - a move which has come to appear permanent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitchell, Julian

Leseproben

One

In the spring of 1961 I was living in a furnished room with minuscule kitchenette and stunted bathtub in New York City. The apartment-house was an old brownstone in the fashionable East Fifties, between Lexington and less fashionable Third, and my two windows (one by the bed, one by the desk) raised their raffia blinds on the yellow-bricked back of a ladies’ residential hotel. On dry days a bluff commercial wind fingered the multi-coloured panties and brassieres draped on the sills across the way, and when the sun shone the girls fluffed out their multi-coloured hair.

One morning I woke with my head like an empty American cinema, full of ghostly distorted voices and the terrible sickly smell of stale popcorn. It was noon (as so often) and my room, all bright and glittering in the dirty air, seemed for a moment worse even than the echoing chamber of horrors of my dreams. Recurring nightmares had muttered through my sleep, as though a tape-recorder had been endlessly unwinding beneath my pillow. It was possible, of course, that Gina Coleridge, the girl who rented the room above me, had been entertaining one or more of her many gentlemen callers all night long; for reasons of her own she often made love on the carpet, and the cracks in my ceiling were evidence of an unrestrained passion. It was possible, too, that Vida Nellermoe, who lived on my floor, had been throwing plates again at the huge red-haired man who seemed to live with her but spent two or three evenings a week whining piteously outside her door, like an overgrown mongrel, while she turned the volume of her TV up and up and up. Then the two handsome antique-dealers, who shared the whole of the ground floor and a liver and white cocker spaniel called Charles, might have been giving one of their parties, which, from the noises which reached me, I assumed to be dullish bachelor orgies. But it wasn’t a Saturday or Sunday, so it couldn’t have been that.

It was Wednesday, nadir of weekdays. My money had almost run out, and there was no mail. The two handsome antique-dealers, thirty-two and twenty-six at a guess, were taking advantage of their lunch-break to tend their small garden, planting out flowers and industriously watering them with a thin pink hose while Charles watched from a canvas chair. There was a tree which I hadn’t yet identified just coming into bud outside my window, and I thought with the first satisfaction of the day that by the time its leaves were fully out I should be back in England where I belonged. A fortnight earlier I had been fired by Malevich, Simonson, Peate, Roscoe and Peate, the eminent brokers for whom I had for eight months operated a lethargic slide-rule in a bright windowless room high up on Wall Street. They had decided, not without reason, that my bent was not for finance, high or low. I could not disagree. We parted with the distant politeness with which we had met. Only Harry Blechman, my colleague in the bright windowless room, had expressed any regret, and that in the brusque way of New Yorkers.

‘You dumb bastard,’ he’d said, shaking his head.

I’d saved enough to live on for a few weeks, and to buy a ticket to England. The boat left in a month, the days stretched impoverishedly ahead, like a bread-line.

To be unemployed in a city as frenetically busy as New York is to feel despised and rejected of men. Express elevators were rising and falling in all the skyscrapers, but not for me. If I strained my ears I could hear, below the din of traffic, the subway thundering to White Plains or Coney Island, and I was not aboard. There was nothing for it but to drag myself with my echoing head to the drugstore on the corner and have some coffee. After that I could amble over to the Central Park Zoo and inspect the Himalayan thar as it poked its snout from its heated stall to sniff the outer, ice-cream-scented air. I felt for that thar, as for a fellow-citizen of boredom. He (or perhaps she—I had seen only the snout) and I were both aliens on this granite island, captives of a civilisation to which we would never belong. I wrote him (or her) occasional poems in tight metrical forms about the need for exiles to keep their mouths buttoned, their souls hermetically sealed, if they wished to survive. Equally occasionally the mar would catch my eye and hold it for several seconds. We communicated. I sent the poems to a magazine, from which they returned by the next post. What the thar and I shared was too foreign for the New York papers.

I leaned out of the window and smiled down on the two antiquarian horticulturists. Sometimes they would see me and smile back. Today, though, they were busy bickering over the hose.

‘No,’ the younger was saying, ‘you did it this morning.’ His name, to guess from the mail-boxes below was either Ed Schneider or Tom Margierson.

‘You don’t sprinkle it even,’ said the other.

‘I do too.’

‘You do not.’

Bored, Charles sat up in the canvas chair and snatched at a fly. Then he began to pant, his long pink tongue slobbering his liver and white chops.

I said ‘Good morning’, but none of them heard me, so I studied the lingerie of the ladies’ hotel. A blonde girl on the eighteenth floor immediately withdrew her brassiere. Tom and Ed began to fight playfully for the hose. My phone rang.

The burr of a telephone is potent with meaning. It can be love, death, money, a job. But my snug beige instrument, with its soft American bell, had deceived me too often. I waited for the rough romantic call of opportunity and heard only professionally eager voices drearily proffering cut-rate magazines and chocolate milk. Once a radio station breathlessly promised me all of ten dollars if I could answer the easy question with which it had just challenged the gibbering aether. Doorbells were just as bad. Twice mine had been rung by strange men who claimed they knew the previous occupant. When I explained he was no longer living there they said, Well, why didn’t they come up and have a drink, anyway, what the hell, Gene was a good fellow, I’d’ve liked him.

The phone rang for a third time and I picked it up. Howard Auchinclos greeted me, anxious that he might have woken me up. Assured that he hadn’t he invited me to a party he was hurriedly throwing together that evening at nine thirty for someone I hadn’t heard of. Concealing my extreme pleasure, I pretended to check my diary, then said I’d love to come.

‘Great,’ he said, and hung up.

Howard Auchinclos was of uncertain age, perhaps thirty-four, perhaps forty-eight, with a thin coverlet of blond fluff on his otherwise shiny head. His eyes bulged greyly at you as he shook your hand, and you saw at once that he wore contact lenses where glasses were called for. Even with the lenses his sight was poor, and he looked at life sideways, cynically. He was tall, with thick rubbery lips, and he was best late at night, with a long drink of whisky in his hand, when he would tell improbable sexual anecdotes with a air of droll amusement that any audience could be so crassly entertained. He spoke, as he looked, sideways, the words slipping out of one corner of his mouth and into his glass. He smoked continually out of the other corner. He even walked sideways, entering a room over one shoulder and sidling up to you obliquely. The only time you could be certain he wasn’t with you was when he stood four-square before you, blowing smoke into your face. He was twice married, and now a convinced divorcé. His first wife, a beautiful and briefly chic French novelist, spent fourteen months observing his every move, then left New York with a Peruvian guitarist, as gigolos were then known. The novel she wrote from that humourless scrutiny narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt and was hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as the most devastating attack on American mores since de Tocqueville. ‘I’m afraid,’ said Howard, ‘she didn’t really understand New York. I mean, she took Greenwich Village seriously.’ All he ever said about his second wife, a rich Philadelphian, was, ‘Our silences were prodigious.’ Some said Howard was really queer, but one heard that about everyone.

I knew him through the wife of my Oxford tutor—an effervescent girl, unsuited to the still, dank society of Boar’s Hill—who said she’d known him when she’d been working as a secretary in New York before her marriage. She was sure he would be glad to be my sponsor. And sponsorship was indeed Howard’s métier. After I’d been in New York two days, just looking at it and trembling, I called him and said who I was and that I was there and that my attempt to discover something for myself had miserably failed. It was swelteringly hot, and I was staying at the YMCA and no, it wasn’t quite the new world I’d hopefully come to explore.

‘You can’t possibly stay there,’ said Howard. ‘You should have got in touch with me right away. I’ve been expecting you. Come and have a drink now.’

So I went and had a drink, and Howard knew of an apartment which was just being vacated by a girl-friend of his who was marrying a simply appalling man from Pittsburgh the following week and I was soon installed, though the rent staggered me.

‘Don’t fuss about it,’ said Howard. ‘You simply have to live on the East side, and this is an excellent street. You couldn’t do better.’

And then he arranged the job for me at Malevich, Simonson, Peate, Roscoe and Peate, and soon I was pretending I was one of the great fraternity of...