Protégés

We’re looking out at the sea. A great shadow seems to move under the water. ‘I can see it’, say W., ‘look: the kraken of your stupidity.’ Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

W. has little interest in literature apart from Krasznahorkai. ‘He’s great’, he says, and we remember again our favourite scene from Tarr’s Damnation, for which Krasznahorkai wrote the script. ‘The best bit of dialogue I’ve ever heard’, says W.

W. has decided very firmly that I’m working class, and nothing will stand in the way of that. He rescued me from the warehouse floor. ‘Am I your protégé?’, I ask him. – ‘How old are you?’ I tell him. ‘You’re too old to be a protégé.’ – ‘Does that mean you’re going to get another one?’ I think W.’s always on the lookout. ‘You have great faith in the younger generation’, I tell him. But I think W. wants to be a protégé himself.

We decided some years ago that what we needed was a leader. ‘We need to be pushed’, says W., ‘we’re incapable of doing it on our own.’ We consider candidates. ‘We mustn’t tell our leader that he’s our leader’, says W., when we decide. Of course it’s the first thing we tell him, in a pub near Greenwich. ‘I think we scared him’, says W., later. Which one of us told him? Was it W. or me? Next time, we agree, we mustn’t make that mistake! We have a candidate in mind. We’ll be much more careful this time.

‘Of course you can’t be ambitious once you know you’ve failed’, says W., ‘if there’s one thing we know, it’s that we’ve failed.’ – ‘Definitely.’ W.’s favourite question: ‘at what age did you become aware you were a failure?’, or ‘When did you know, absolutely know you had failed?’, or ‘When did you stop denying it to yourself, your failure?’

For his part, W. gave away his notebooks and writings. ‘I’d write all the time, but I realised I would never be Kafka.’ And then the traditional apothegm we use when we say, Kafka, just as Homer uses formulas such as the ‘wine dark sea’: ‘How was it possible for a human being to write like that?’ We pause in reverence.

W.’s lifestory turns around Kafka, he reflects on the train. He studied at the university he did because it was permitted to study European literature in translation there. Of course they lied: ‘we didn’t read Kafka at all!’ For a time, W. thought he might become Kafka. ‘He was all I read. Constantly, again and again’, and he speaks lovingly of discovering the brightly coloured Shocken editions of Kafka in his school library.

Our inaugural Dogma paper was on Kafka – the room was packed, and he spoke very movingly (of course, my paper was inept. ‘What were you going on about?’) And, in a difficult situation, W. always asks himself what Kafka would do. ‘You have to know you’re not Kafka’, W. insists. ‘All this writing! You should stop it!’

W. stopped writing after his undergraduate years. ‘I knew I’d never be a genius.’ He gave his notebooks and writings to a girlfriend. ‘I haven’t kept a scrap’, he says, as the German countryside rushes by us. We are standing, drinking beer. German teenagers are playing early Depeche Mode on a ghetto blaster. ‘Do you think you’re a genius?’, W. asks me. – ‘God, no.’ – ‘I think you still have a nostalgia for the time when you thought you might be a genius.’ I turn the question on him. ‘We’re failures, the pair of us’, he says. ‘But we know we’ll never amount to anything. That’s our gift. Our gift to the world.’

‘You can’t blame me for criticising you,’ says W., ‘it’s your fault, you bring it out in people. It’s because you’re helpless. You invite criticism.’ I tell him this maybe the case. But isn’t a certain kind of person who likes to criticise?, I ask. W. says the blame lies squarely with me. ‘It’s entirely your fault.’

Kafka and Tarr are our spiritual leaders. ‘They’ve gone the furthest’, we agree. Apparently the latest Tarr production is in trouble. ‘We should send him some money.’ But we need more immediate leaders, too. ‘We’re stupid. We need to be led.’ We long ago decided that we could redeem ourselves only by creating opportunities for those more capable than ourselves. ‘It’s our gift’, says W., ‘we know we’re stupid, but we also know what stupidity is not. We ought to throw ourselves at their feet and ask them to forgive us.’ – ‘I think that might scare them.’ Our leaders are easily scared.

I keep a mental list of W.’s favourite questions, which he constantly asks me so as to ask himself. ‘At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?’; ‘When was it that you first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?’; ‘When you look back at your life, what do you see?’; ‘How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it it?’

‘What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to nothing?’, W. asks me with great seriousness. – ‘I never expected it to amount to something!’ – ‘Yes you did. You’re the type.’ Another question, a very serious issue for W.: ‘Why have your friends never made you greater?’ This is W.’s great fantasy, he admits: a group of friends who could make one another think. ‘Do I make you think?’, I ask him. – ‘No. You’re an idiot.’

Then: ‘what do you consider to be your greatest weakness?’ W. answers for me: ‘Never to come to terms with your lack of ability. Because you haven’t, have you?’ – ‘Have you?’ W. wonders for a moment. – ‘No.’ I ask him what is most distorted about his understanding of the world. ‘I have this fantasy of being part of a community, and this prevents my individual action.’ And then, dolefully, ‘I don’t work hard enough.’

But he works night and day, I tell him. – ‘Oh compared to you, I work. Compared to you, we’re all busy.’ W. likes to berate me for my lack of work. ‘What time did you get up to work this morning?’ – ‘Seven.’ – ‘I was up at five. At – five!’, says W. But he laments the fact that he watches television in the evenings. He used to work in the evenings, he said. In fact, he worked all the time. A room with a bed and a desk and his books, that’s all. ‘That was my peak’, he says. ‘When are you going to peak? Are you peaking now? Is this it?’

W. doesn’t know how I can live with myself. ‘Why don’t you do any work? Why? Send me something. Something you’ve written. Stop writing your stupid blog. How much time do you spend on it?’ An hour a day, I tell him. ‘Well that’s not too bad.’ He remembers how much I used to publish. ‘Of course publishing is not work’, he says, ‘nor is writing.’ You have to read, W. insists. He gets up in the morning, very early, to read. When he can’t sleep, he’s up straightaway, and to read.

In the evening, before bed, he reads Krasznahorkai, but in the mornings, he’s up long before the dawn to read philosophy. ‘And what are you doing at that time in the morning?’ – ‘I’m asleep, like sensible people! Besides, some of us have to work!’ It’s true, W. has come late to administration. He managed to avoid bureaucracy until recently. It gets him down. I, on the other hand, he observes, am a very gifted bureaucrat. ‘It takes a particular kind of person to be good at that sort of thing’, he says. I’m very organised, I tell him. I’m an orderly person. ‘It’s to do with being working class’, W. insists. I don’t expect as much from life as him.

W. always flails about when he has to administer. He pings me obscenities. He rings me up, and asks me how much I’ve eaten. This seems to calm him. I always exaggerate. ‘I’ve eaten too much’, I tell him, ‘far too much.’ – ‘Go on, tell me, what’ve you eaten?’ I tell him he’s a feeder. ‘Go on, tell me!’, W.’s getting excited. – ‘Do you see yourself as a nuturer?’, I ask W. – ‘No. Yes. Tell me what you’ve eaten! How fat are you now?’