Nuns and Dogs

People are avoiding us, I tell W. He agrees. They can smell failure, he says.

W. makes it a rule always to include a nun and a dog in his books for purposes of pathos, he says. He has an imaginary dog, whom he uses in tender examples about animals and has had an imaginary encounter with a nun in a hospital. She was selfless, he says, utterly selfless. He got the idea from Raymond Gaita, he says, who has a nun in one of his books and a dog in another. In his book-before-last, W. invented imaginary children in a particular tender example. It made him weep, he says.

His book-before-last is better than him, W. and I agree. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says. The book seems to stream splendidly above us both. Neither of us can follow it.

For his part, W.’s mission is to reduce the French poetic style to clear Anglo-Saxon prose. Mine, I tell him is to reduplicate the French poetic style in an Anglo-Saxon poetic style very badly, like an ape.