One Lark, One Horse Read online

  MICHAEL HOFMANN

  One Lark, One Horse

  Of course he was very witty and funny when he was happy, and loved to tell her Jewish jokes and stories; like the one about Goldberg and Cohen, who have delicatessen shops next to each other. Goldberg’s shop (he recounted) is always packed, while Cohen’s is empty; so finally Cohen asks his friend what on earth he is selling. ‘Lark pâté,’ Goldberg tells him. ‘Lark pâté?’ gasps Cohen. ‘But how can you afford it?’ ‘I add a bit of horse,’ Goldberg replies. ‘How much?’ ‘One lark, one horse,’ says Goldberg.

  CAROL ANGIER, The Double Bond:

  Primo Levi – A Biography

  Stop trying to be a poet. There’s no time.

  NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Lindsay Garbutt

  The Years

  LV

  Daewoo

  Derrick

  Smethwick

  Portrait d’une Femme

  Stag Party, Tallinn, May

  Judith Wright Arts Centre

  Cricket

  Letter from Australia

  Old Mexico

  Recuerdos de Bundaberg

  see something say something

  Before she met me

  Cavafy: Subrosa

  Hudson Ride

  Baselitz & his Generation

  Fontane

  Sankt Georg

  Night

  F.S.

  Broken Nights

  For Adam

  Warszawa

  Dead Thing

  Valais

  November

  Gottfried Benn, c.1916

  Ostsee

  Auden

  In Western Mass.

  End of the Pier Show

  Poem

  Lisburn Road

  Motet

  Ebenböckstrasse

  Lake Isle

  Seagulls, Italian Style

  Venice Beach

  Midterms

  Higher Learning

  Less Truth

  Silly Season, 2015

  The Case for Brexit

  Coventry

  On Forgetting

  Cooking for One

  Idyll

  Acknowledgements and thanks

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  ONE LARK, ONE HORSE

  Lindsay Garbutt

  I’m past the age of reading, and well into the age of re-reading. I know, because I hated my father for it when he did it. And I don’t re-read either. About eight months ago, I started buying reading glasses. I have three pairs, which I variously use and don’t use. I’ve never had glasses before. I was the boy who saw the buffalo a mile away. A piece I wrote last summer about Brecht was my first with glasses. I avoid putting them on as much as possible, because they make the rest of the room disappear. Now I have another piece about Brecht to write. I’m an inefficient volcano. Half-remembered scraps of things come out of my head. I don’t know what book I last read, except for purposes of reviewing or translating. ‘Do you have that in a large type edition?’ Admission: I read Leon Wieseltier’s piece in the New York Times about our virtualised post-human scientistic predicament. The Internet seems to have killed off pictures, writing and music at one fell swoop, which isn’t bad going for one lousy money-spinning invention. I thought that was probably the best synoptic article I’ve read for ten years, or whenever the Guardian had a piece about a nasty practice called ‘astroturfing’. The world is so full of false accounting and conniving. All vampires and zombies, if you ask me. It gives one conniptions. I put on John Cale’s Paris 1919 this morning, and sat there in floods of tears. That mixture of prettiness and geography and bottleneck guitar does me in. And Lowell George and Ritchie Hayward are dead. Nothing post-human there. And when I last saw John Cale he had pink hair and a goatee. I wonder what he was reading.

  The Years

  Nothing required an account of me

  And still I didn’t give one.

  I might have been a virtual casualty,

  A late victim of the Millennium Bug.

  No spontaneity, no insubordination,

  Not even any spare capacity.

  LV

  The luncheon voucher years

  (the bus pass and digitised medical record

  always in the inside pocket come later,

  along with the constant orientation to the nearest hospital).

  The years of ‘sir’ (long past ‘mate’, much less ‘dearie’),

  of invisibility, of woozy pacifism,

  of the pre-emptive smile of the hard-of-hearing,

  of stiff joints and the small pains

  that will do me in. The ninth complement

  of fresh – stale – cells, the Late Middle Years

  (say, 1400 AD – on the geological calendar),

  the years of the incalculable spreading middle,

  the years of speculatively counting down

  from an unknown terminus,

  because the whole long stack –

  shale, vertebrae, pancakes, platelets, plates –

  won’t balance anymore, and doesn’t correspond anyway

  to the thing behind the eyes that says ‘I’

  and feels uncertain, green and treble

  and wants its kilt as it climbs up to the lectern to blush

  and read ‘thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb’.

  The years of taking the stairs two at a time

  (though not at weekends)

  a bizarre debt to Dino Buzzatti’s Tartar Steppe,

  the years of a deliberate lightness of tread,

  perceived as a nod to Franz Josef

  thinking with his knees and rubber-tyred Viennese Fiaker.

  The years when the dead are starting to stack up.

  The years of incuriosity and novarum rerum

  incupidissimus, the years of cheap acquisition

  and irresponsible postponement, or cheap

  postponement and irresponsible acquisition,

  of listlessness, of miniaturism, of irascibility,

  of being soft on myself, of being hard on myself,

  and neither knowing nor especially caring which.

  The years of re-reading (at arm’s length).

  The fiercely objected-to professional years,

  the appalling indulgent years, the years of no challenge

  and comfort zone and safely within my borders.

  The years of no impressions and little memory.

  The years of ‘I would prefer not’

  and ‘leave me in the cabbage’.

  The years of standing in elevators

  under the elevator lights in the elevator mirror,

  feeling and looking like leathered frizz,

  an old cheese-topped dish under an infrared hotplate,

  before they kindly took out the lights

  and took out the mirror, and slipped in screens

  for news, weather, and sponsors’ handy messages.

  The years of one over the thirst

  and another one over the hunger, of insomnia

  and sleeping in, of creases and pouches and heaviness

  and the barber offering to trim my eyebrows.

  The years of the unbeautiful corpse in preparation.

  The years to choose: sild, or flamber

  …?

  Daewoo

  Heavy, and now grizzled (pro tem) and generally high coloured.

  The voice light, tripping over itself, setting off at an angle

  into the thickets of vocabulary. It’s gone; let it go.

  No one knows I stole (wonder how?) Alan Waugh’s chewed voice

 
when I was seventeen. Piling out of the car,

  my Siebensachen on the tarmac, my rucksack upside down,

  the small size of bulldog clips everywhere.

  Forty years of chaotic exits, and now one more.

  Derrick

  That rather sprawling

  foursquare spelling. Always

  in my mind half-

  associated with the hirsute

  14-year-old I saw

  in the newspaper

  who sued his local

  education authority

  to keep his beard,

  out of a sort of medical

  necessity. My neighbour

  took up residence

  next to this youth

  in my head. Derrick.

  Clean-shaven, Welsh,

  heavyset, lugubrious,

  his steel-grey hair

  apparently parted

  by a steel comb.

  Tracksuit bottoms,

  graphite racket, retired

  from something or other,

  maybe ex-army.

  A plangent sonorousness.

  If I have it right,

  India. A grandfather

  in spe, then fact.

  He was shy, I was shy.

  At the height of things

  he fed me clippings

  from the Telegraph,

  and we talked about

  militaria (I was translating

  Ernst Jünger –

  though not in time for him).

  Some village-y gene

  had given him

  the atavistic habit

  of standing outside

  his front door for hours

  arms crossed,

  surveying the scene.

  Perhaps a swagger-stick

  to take the parade.

  He knew the street

  as I didn’t know him,

  spent years setting plants

  and persecuting graffiti

  in a tiny doggy flowerbed

  under the railway bridge,

  played tennis

  on the corporation courts,

  kept an ear open

  for the local scuttlebutt.

  Like a hardy perennial

  he stood there

  under his wife’s hollyhocks –

  now both under the ground,

  massive heart attack (he),

  years of chemotherapy

  at the Royal Free and Easy (she),

  buried from St Dominic’s

  down the road,

  the orphaned court,

  the problematic flowerbed

  improbably flowering,

  the neighbours shuffling past

  the hollyhocks (pink),

  more local connections

  than I’ll ever have.

  Smethwick

  ‘What changed? Same maisonette in West London,

  the straight shot of Talbot Road, held onto in spite of everything –

  one’s original intended went away, someone else eventuated –

  riding to work on the Tube like an Edwardian, same job, steady Eddie,

  not “a new kind of tobacco at eleven”, and “my love

  returning on the four o’clock bus”, more “cut out the ciggies”

  and a new palliness. Hamlet for yonks, kicked upstairs,

  Prospero under this bonkers management.’

  Portrait d’une Femme

  The age demanded an image

  Of its accelerated grimace

  EZRA POUND

  You were energised by your epoch.

  The difference between a harmless nut – John Doe, Jane Doe, plain Jane,

  practically any mediocrity – standing on a beach

  and the same harmless nut

  riding a wave of (now) cultural self-righteousness

  about to tube. A tsunami armed with thunderbolts.

  Empowered – yea, packing.

  You played everything to the sympathetic studio theatre

  of your hearers, a chorus-cum-sounding-board.

  They were your doo-wop boys and girls,

  your clique and claque and Marshall stack. The church hall chairs scraped,

  the cheap black crêpe backdrop rustled ‘cutting edge’ at you.

  You paid attention to how they oohed and aahed for you,

  and then pantomime hissed, and balled their fists and bayed for blood:

  the half-lustful half-men betraying their half-gender

  when they weren’t speculating what you were like in bed,

  the frightened girls who’d never seen anything like you

  but thought it might be fun (after Goth) to be a Maenad,

  the Pharisaic mothers going home to their chilly fires,

  their dim, furtive, put-upon husbands and their neo-feral offspring

  with a ‘There but for the grace of God’ on their bony lips.

  And it was all you, the decisive impulse, the focus, the leadership;

  why, there was the beef, right there with its bleeding foot in its mouth.

  The venomous articulation with its trademark solecisms

  (naive to wonder how anyone with a Cambridge degree in it

  could hurt the language like you).

  A sort of chronically over-emphatic sub-style of maimed English,

  a testosterone debris of nursery babble, pop psychology, tabloid yelp and obscenity.

  Strangers were helpless in its vortices,

  lawyers needless to say loved it –

  what they would have given (M’lud) to be able to solicit like that.

  It was all as humdrum as graffiti, vivid and appalling

  and unutterably humdrum, it was Mary Elizabeth

  Bott in the William books going

  ‘I’ll thcweam and thcweam and thcweam.’

  It’s strange, you were ungainly, but you were never wrong.

  You had the yessers and nodders and eggers-on

  to take care of that. Ungainliness in this instance

  happened to be the price of rightness.

  You espoused ungainliness. Worshipped it.

  Ungainliness was the new duty. The new beauty.

  Disinhibition ruled. Wa-hey.

  And so it somehow had to be. You did it for them.

  You erupted out of Englishness and made an exhibition of yourself.

  (Tiny terremoto in Derby that I read about in Mexico, 2 point something on the Richter scale.)

  Once it might have been said where you came from you forgot yourself,

  but that style of rebuke went out of fashion. Anyway, you weren’t into

  forgetting yourself. You were into remembering yourself.

  As you would have said, 24/7.

  It would have been good to do smoulder like Anna Magnani

  or have a wronged profile like Dante’s, whoever the fuck Dante is.

  But you couldn’t hack that.

  So you chucked glasses and went public.

  Bridget Jones thuggee. Jordan tragédienne.

  The English rose goes ape.

  Deal or no deal.

  You were good value at cocktail parties. For about five minutes.

  Then you were a bore; and as the good book didn’t say, the bores are always with us.

  You would have loved a column like Margaret Cook. (Not a cooking column.)

  Your mother was dead, your godmother was dead,

  look what happened to them. (They died.)

  Perhaps there was something you could do,

  and so you stayed alive and humbly served the numpties.

  Stag Party, Tallinn, May

  ‘Umlauts and double vowels. The pale stares of Estonians.

  Sex workers. I wish they all could be. Marriage industry execs,

  More like. Baltic brides. Clothes short, scant, tight and bright.

  A predilection for things long buried in the ground.

  An unusual proliferation of maimings and disfigurements.

  Pa
thos in monumental sculpture. Lilac in the offing.

  Polyethnic, also Cyrillic. Old Believers over the water.

  British booze cruisers. There’s nothing to touch breasts.’

  Judith Wright Arts Centre

  My office! My office at the Judy! The Judy

  at the head of Fortitude Valley – Happy Valley! –

  the ex-tea and -coffee warehouse, but reformed, reformed!

  The industrial brick carcass full of arty bees,

  sphinx of a building couchant on the crest of the hill,

  the infrared elevator mysteriously redolent of cloves,

  restaurant smuggled into one corner, cafe in another,

  and the whole dipped in chocolate and tile.

  The walk along Brunswick Street to my office

  up two hills and down two dales – why every town in Australia

  has to have a street named for Hessian mercenaries

  I don’t know – past the absurdly good coffee shops

  and the absurdly good ice cream parlours

  and the absurdly good banks, the backpacker hostels,

  the ethnic restaurants, the skin clinics

  and fitness studios and chiropractors and nail bars.

  A touch about it of DHSS and Camden Town,

  a touch of Prenzlauer Berg, and then always a touch

  of paddle-steamer, the tropical levity conferred

  by the tracery balconies and louvres and pillarets,

  the rusting roofs and riotous growth;

  taking in the trees as they went red and blue

  and the stumps of the succulents spurted buttercream,

  and the whiff of mock-orange and jasmine and chips.

  The bookshop no longer, and the cinema no longer

  and the theatre a fishbar theatrically named The Codpiece

  but still the surprisingly earnest and massive hotels,