Category: W.

W. and I are celebrants of rivers, and always feel the need to hail them. ‘The mighty Tyne!’, W. might say, and I might say ‘the mighty Plym!’ The sight of a river is always an occasion. So, of course, is the sea. ‘It’s the ozone’, says W. ‘it makes you feel good’.

It does, and the view of the sheet of the sea, just past Exeter. The whole sheet of the sea, viewed from the train, neat Plmouth Gin and ice in our plastic cups. ‘This is happiness’, says W. Of course, they’ll have to reroute the trains soon. They’re electrical and shortcircuit when the surf splashes over them. Sometimes the trains stop for hours, completely shortcircuited. ‘It’s the new trains’, says W., ‘they’re useless’.

W. says he’s felt ill nearly all his adult life. ‘When was the last time you felt well?’, I ask him. He can’t remember. ‘It’s been years’, he says suddenly. ‘Years!’ He used to go for great walks on the moors, he remembers. That’s when he last felt healthy: on his great weekend walks, when he would set off with no end in particular in view. He’d just walk, for miles, across the moors.

There’s nothing better, he says, than to climb up to the moors, and sea the blue strip of the sea in the distance. Are there really big cats up there, panthers and the like?, I ask him. He never saw any, he said. But his moor walks have long since finished. He lacks something, says W. There’s something missing in him. Why doesn’t he go on his great moor walks any more?, he muses, as we look out to sea.

It’s important to hail rivers, we both agree, but just as important to hail the sea, although we do not do so by name. We do not, for instance, hail the sea south of Edinburgh as the North Sea, or the sea south of Exeter as the Atlantic (‘is it the Atlantic?’, I ask W.) A simple, ‘the sea!’ is enough. Just as when we see the edge of the moor on our train journeys in Devon, we say ‘the moor!’

Ah, the moor! W. is feeling regretful again. He looks very young, I tell him, younger than me, even though he’s several years older. His life is full of regret, he says, and gets out his Spinoza. He’s going to read now, he tells me, and I’ll have to entertain myself.

By email, W. tells me I come across as too whiny in the W. posts. ‘It’s better when you make yourself talk, rather than just reacting to me. But of course I am a terrible nag’.

W. remembers that I spoke to him at length about free jazz, commenting on its relationship to free improvisation, and the distrust many Afro-American improvisers have felt towards the rhetoric of depersonalisation taken over from John Cage and post-Cageans. Jazz improvisation is often linked to the idea of telling your own story, of finding your voice, not depersonalisation, I’d said, though perhaps this is not so at odds with post-Cagean discourse on free improvisation as one might think. Perhaps the two could be thought together, I’d said, and tried at some length to outline how.

He’d enjoyed listening to me, W. says; he’d learnt something, and why didn’t I write about that? I like to present myself as a victim, W. observes. It’s one of my key traits. In fact, it is my key trait. I want to think of myself as a victim and then whine about it night and day.

Is W. a victim? No, not really, says W. He doesn’t have the victim mentality that I’ve perfected. ‘You love feeling like a victim. You like nothing better than to be persecuted’. – ‘But you must admit, I’ve been a little persecuted!’ – ‘How?’, says W., ‘give me examples’, and when I do, he says, ‘you’re no more persecuted than I am. You’re not in the least persecuted’.

Why do I like to feel persecuted?, W. muses. It’s because of my general hysteria. ‘You’re an hysteric’, says W., ‘ceaselessly whining’, but he likes me because of this. ‘There’s something magnificent about your whining. Sometimes it reaches a magnificent purity. You attain whining itself, says W., ‘the pure "to whine"’.

W. is a mystic, and I am a whiner, he says. It takes a mystic to discover what is eternal in my whining. ‘It’s magnificent’, he says, ‘go on, do some whining. Whine, fat boy. Tell your story’.

Last year, on the banks of the Dreisam river (‘ah, the mighty Dreisam’), W. held forth at length on finding your own voice. He thinks he might have found his quite recently, he said. He’s noticed quite a change in his writing.

‘And what about you?’, W. reflected. ‘Your voice’, he says to me, ‘is like a transcendental whining’. It’s amazing, he notes, just how much I whine, and how much I give myself to it. ‘It absorbs everything you are’, said W. In many ways, he admires it, said W. He thinks it’s why he’s drawn to me.

W. and I are watching the new Scout Niblett video, the one where Will Oldham is dressed as a skeleton. ‘She’s from Nottingham’, says W. proudly. Nottingham! Imagine that! Not so far from here! Will Oldham does a handstand in the video. I’m impressed, and say so. W. likes to watch me watching Will Oldham being physical. ‘You’re impressed by his physicality’, he says, and he’s right.

W. say him Will Oldham  a dance machine at ATP, where you have to put your feet onto these pads that light up in time to the music. ‘He was fantastic’, says W. The next year, he paid for me to do the same. ‘You were useless. You’re not a physical man. That’s why you admire Will Oldham’s physicality, isn’t it?’ I say it is. ‘Of course, Will Oldham’s a surfer’, says W. ‘He’s surprisingly buff. But you’re not buff, are you? Except for your arms. But they’re just grotesquely big’.

W. remarks on how small Will Oldham is. ‘He’s tiny’. So is David Pajo, I say. ‘Oh yes, he’s small’. For his part, W. has always considered himself a small man. Once, our friend X. a nightclub bouncer, picked up W. and twirled him round over his head like a cheerleader’s baton. W. didn’t mind. He always feels safe with X., he says. X. makes him feel secure and safe. We both pause to think about X., whom we haven’t seen for a while. Ah, X.!

Do make him feel safe?, I ask W. ‘No’, he says. ‘Just thin’. W. says I’m, getting fatter. ‘You’re not going to last long’, he says. ‘You haven’t got too many years left. Look at you. When you die, I’m going to be your literary executor. Delete, delete, delete that’s what I’m going to do’.

W. is telling us about ideas. He’s had one idea, which took him 15 years to formulate. 15 years! 

‘How many ideas have you had?’, says W. I tell him I’m not sure. What’s the sign of an idea? ‘They have to be clear and distinct’, says W. ‘Clear and distinct.’

What I want is to be loved, W. has decided. ‘You want to be adored,’ he says. W.’s much less concerned with being adored. ‘That’s why I can have ideas’, he says. He can work in silence for years. He doesn’t need external affirmation. He’s like a mole, he says. Digging, with his little paws working away and the wet soil on his nose.

Sometimes, W. concedes, it’s as if I have ideas. I once spoke to him very movingly about the Phaedrus, for example, and the reason why Socrates has to leave the city to talk to his friend. W. immediately lays claim to any idea I might have in his articles. I would do the same, he says. But of course, my ideas are always wrong. They’re full of pathos, he says, and they sound correct, but in fact they are no such thing. ‘You always get the Greek wrong. Always.’

But sometimes, for a moment, the clouds do clear. ‘You manage to speak sense’, says W., ‘or something like sense.’

‘There was that pub in Oxford’, W. remembers. ‘We all fell silent and listened in wonder. Not to what you said, which may or may not have been sensible, and in fact probably wasn’t; it was probably the usual pathos and hot air, but that you could say it.

‘You of all people. No one expects it of you. Quite the opposite in fact. Which is why it’s so surprising.’ W. himself was amazed. ‘And there was that time on the docks in Plymouth. The clouds parted. You spoke sense for nearly an hour.’ What did I speak about? W. can’t remember. But he’d been amazed, he remembered that.

‘You should never hang on to conversations,’ says W. He never does. But he’s a great believer in discussion and friendship. ‘Not like you. You’re not capable of friendship. You’re always about to betray me. All you want is to be adored’, says W.

W. admires the rituals of football. That’s what it’s all about, he says, as we sit among the football fans in the pub, the ritual. You go to the pub, then to the match and then back to the pub to discuss the match. It’s the ritual that matters. But you don’t know anything about football, do you? Or discussion. It’s enough you can do to drink. That’s all you do night and day, isn’t it: drink. It’s why you’re so fat, isn’t it, fatboy?

W. is impressed by my arms. ‘They’re huge’, he says. How come he’s never noticed before?, he wonders. It must be my vests. ‘You’re going through a vest phase’, he says, ‘and it doesn’t become you.’ How many vests do I have, he asks me. Thirty. ‘Thirty vests! All the same colour?’ Yes, all the same colour. Olive green. ‘Thirty olive green vests’, says W. ‘They make you look fat’. But what about my arms? ‘Oh yes, you’ve got big arms. Too big. They’re monstrous.’

W., who has a keen interest in military history, is telling us about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says to form a great defensive wall. Their spears would poke out the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W. Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this. You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx, says W. You’d be the first one to break it.

W. admires loyalty everywhere he finds it. Take the animal kingdom. Swans! says W. They mate for life! You are the opposite of a swan, he says. Friendship means nothing to you. You’d betray me for a woman, he says. In fact, that’s what you always do. You’re always about to betray me, he says.

W.’s flight was cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat. It’s a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.

When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge. ‘You’ve never felt beatitude,’ says W. ‘You’re not capable of it.’

W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious. ‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.

The Ethics, says W. It’s the only book I’ve ever thought is completely right. It’s the opposite of your flat, says W. God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittest thing they have?

W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore. You have to read in the original language, he says. Next he’ll refresh his Greek, W. says.

We used to learn Greek together, only he and the others had the answer book, and liked to watch me squirm with my exercises, having cribbed from the translation in advance. Your idiocy, says W., was spectacular.

For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus. ‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz – and Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza. Ah, The Ethics, he sighs. Beatitude!, he sighs.

W. wants to understand me. He’s decided to list my affects. ‘It’s like the tick in Deleuze’, he says. ‘It responds to heat and warmth. It’s a very simple being. Like you. You’re simple.’ 

‘We’ll start with the living room’, he says. ‘Are you taking notes?’ I’m writing on a post-it pad. ‘It’s cold’, he says. ‘Write that down. I’m freezing. How can you live like this? And it’s dark’, he says. ‘There’s no light. I can’t see anything. And it’s damp. That’s another affect.’ I’ve got the dehumidifier on, I tell him. ‘It’s still damp’, says W.

And why am I always putting vaseline on my lips? ‘Vaseline, he says, that’s another of your affects. The internet. You like writing on the internet, don’t you? How can you go on writing that bilge? You’ve got no honour. No shame. No goodness. And looking out of the window. That’s your other affect, isn’t it? Look at it out there. It’s shit. How can you live like this?’

W. is still listing my affects. He’s delineating the basic categories, he says. ‘Television. You like TV, don’t you?’, says W. I tell him I don’t watch it that much. ‘I’m not surprised. The remote is broken. How can you watch anything? So what else do you do? Are there any affects for you in the bathroom?’ I’m indifferent to the bathroom, I tell him. ‘What do you think about when you’re in there?’ Nothing, I tell him. You, I tell him, and he laughs.

‘Well then, your bedroom. Is that where you do your reading? You don’t really read anything, do you? You don’t read. And what about the kitchen? Stacks of tins of fish. You eat the same thing every day, don’t you? Exactly the same thing! Tinned fish! For his part, W. is a believer in a varied diet. ‘I try to vary what I eat. Not like you.’

W. has a larger range of affects than me. ‘I live with someone. That’s what does it. Otherwise I’d be a sad fucker like you.’ Of course W.’s house is much nicer, he says. It’s not cold, for one thing. Or dark. Or damp.

W.’s tired of listing my affects. How many have we got? Eight general categories, I tell him. He looks around. ‘Oh fuck it, that will do.’

W. is visiting and I give him my bed, inflating another one in the living room.

I’m ill, I tell W. ‘You’re not ill, you’ve got a cold. A mild one.’

No one knows about it when W. is ill, he says. ‘I’m not a whiner like you’.

We watch the scene in A Scanner Darkly, where Freck has his sins read to him by a creature from between dimensions. ‘We’re going to read your sins to you in shifts. It will take all eternity’. This gives W. an idea.

Later, W. installs himself in the chair of judgement. I’m on the pump up bed, ill on the floor. ‘I’m going to list your shortcomings’, he says. ‘Your life. Where should I begin?’

W.’s at his happiest criticising me. I like being criticised, he says. ‘Masochism and sadism’, says W. ‘It’s perfect’.

We’re off to a conference. How many shirts are you taking?, asks W. 4, I tell him. 4! He says he’ll only take 2. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says. You sweat a lot, don’t you fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking? 4, I tell him. 4 pairs of pants, W. muses. He’ll take 4 as well, he decides, and 4 pairs of socks. How many pairs of trousers will you take?, asks W. 1, I tell him. 1!, W. says, after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing? W.’s going to take 2 pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.

W. is a fan of local history, and a great reader of explanatory plaques. Whenever there’s a plaque, he stops to pore over it carefully. Tonight I’ve decided we’re to walk home. W. is whining. ‘It’s cold! It’s too far!’ But we’ve come across a plaque.

‘The Ouseburn Valley’, he reads aloud. ‘What do you know about the Ouseburn Valley?’, he asks me, ‘nothing, I would have thought’. He continues to read. ‘The river becomes a culvert. Do you know what a culvert is?’, he asks me. I don’t. He explains: ‘It’s like a pipe, going underground’. – ‘Ah’. – ‘Once there was a valley here, but it’s been filled in’, W. explains, after reading the plaque. ‘The river goes through a culvert. You know what that is now, don’t you? You’ve learnt something’.

Has he had a thought over the weekend?, I ask W. No, he says, not one. He never thinks when he’s with me. But I think sometimes, W. notes of me. There’s always a parting of the clouds, it’s amazing. For a few minutes, I make sense, speak clearly and thoughtfully, and everyone is amazed. Sal was impressed at Oxford, says W., remembering the conversation in the beer garden. Ah yes, the beer garden, I say, a moment of illumination.

The problem is that I fear time, W. has decided. I have no stretches of empty time in my day. W., by contrast, always allows for empty time in his day. When he eats, he eats, he doesn’t work. When I eat, by contrast, it is in front of the computer screen. What time do you get up?, says W., wanting to be taken through my work day. At 6.00, I tell him. He gets up at 5.00, sometimes earlier.

I got up at 4.00 yesterday, I tell him. ‘And what did you do?’ – ‘Worked!’ – ‘But did you think?’, W. asks. ‘You can’t think and work.’ My problem is, he has decided, that I fear empty time. Does he fear empty time?, I ask him. No, he says, but then his house is nicer than my flat. And his living room walls aren’t pink. ‘What were you thinking when you painted those walls?’ – ‘It was to bring out the colour of the wood.’ – ‘Pink, though! Why pink?’ It would depress him, says W.

‘So what are you going to do about your leak?’, says W. – ‘It’s being fixed.’ I show him the kitchen. The dehumidifier, working 24 hours a day, has sucked all the damp out. It fills up every 12 hours. ‘That’s a lot of water,’ says W. ‘Where does it come from?’ I tell him not to get Talmudic. The greatest experts on damp are baffled by the damp.

Still, the dehumidifier makes a big difference, W. decides. Thought, says W., are we capable of it? And if not, why not? What does it come down to? Intelligence, I tell him. Raw intelligence. That is lacking in us, less so perhaps in him than in me. Those few extra IQ points make a big difference. But W. works very hard of course. And he even has thoughts, or something like thoughts on occasion.

We wander out into the world, W. with his manbag. He sleeps with it, he says. He keeps it close to him. Can he carry my jumper?, I ask him. He says no, his manbag is full. What’s in there? A book?, I ask him. And tell him there’s no point carrying books, because soon we’ll be drunk. He carries a notebook, says W., in case he has any thoughts. But you won’t have any thoughts, I tell him, because soon you’ll be drunk. ‘I’d drink if my living room was this pink’, says W. ‘It’s depressing.’

I haven’t had any thoughts this weekend, W. observes of me, and I agree. But he admires my new declamatory style, says W. ‘You get louder and louder’, he says appreciatively of my paper giving. Oh yes, I say, like X. ‘No, X. actually has a point to make by bringing things to a climax. You just get loud.’ – ‘And then soft,’ I tell him, ‘it’s dynamics.’ –

‘Dynamics!’, says W., who is always impressed when I drop musical terms into conversation, ‘is that your new word? Go on, what does it mean?’ – ‘It’s when things get loud and then soft. And then loud again.’ – ‘I like the fact that your loudness and softness has nothing to do with what you’re actually saying’, says W. I tell him I knew it would amuse him. ‘Pathos instead of thought,’ I say. ‘Ah yes, pathos. Whining, I call it. You’re good at that.’

W. thinks we should go shopping for a manbag. ‘You need one,’ he says, ‘in case you have any thoughts.’ – ‘I’m not planning on having any thoughts,’ I tell him. – ‘You drink too much, that’s your problem. Mind you, I’d drink if I had your life.’ W. feels ill from all the drinking. Last night, we had a bottle of red wine, then beer, then he drank Tequila from the bottle (‘it’s a sipping Tequila’, I told him), then we finished off the bottle of Plymouth Gin, then a bottle of Cava and then a bottle of Chablis. ‘It was a good Chablis, wasn’t it?’, I say. W. says he was in no position to appreciate it. The next morning, he asks for asprin. ‘And how are you feeling?’, he asks me. Fine, I tell him. Better than usual. – ‘Any thoughts?’ – ‘No.’

We go out to the coast for the day, and eat fish and chips on the Fish Quay. ‘Your problem is that you fear empty time,’ says W. ‘That’s why you don’t think.’ And then, ‘Thought has to surprise you, when you least expect it.’ We watch the big seagulls going about, and the pigeons. What do you feel about pigeons?, I ask him. The Romans brought them with them to England to eat, he says. We should eat them. For his part, W. prefers the seagulls. Thought, when it comes, always surprises him, says W. He’s ready with his notebook, he says, which he keeps in his manbag. That’s why you need a manbag, he says, in case thought surprises you. But you fear the empty time which makes thought possible, says W., so you don’t need a manbag.

Josh Pearson was curious about us, W. says. He’d seen him with his great beard looking round the corner of the chalet, to where we are sitting out on the grass. Possibly he’s heard we were playing his music on the stereo, dancing about, W. strutting up and down the corridor. He was intrigued, says, W.; he was coming round the corner with his big beard. But then you started with your chimp impressions and scared him off.

Josh Pearson would have come and sat with us, says W., and we could have talked about his solo project. But you scared him, he says, by walking on your knuckles like a chimp and making hooting noises like a chimp. Just imagine, Josh Pearson would be sitting here with us, drinking cider and telling us about his life in Berlin, and what did you do? Scare him off, with your chimp impressions.

W. is strutting up and down the corridor of the chalet. It’s a talent I never knew he had. It’s a bit like Mick Jagger. It’s a way of dancing, says W. Strutting up and down the corridor. That was in Somerset. When I asked him to strut during his visit to me, he said he wouldn’t. There’s nowhere to strut, he said. I said he should strut up and down the corridor. He said he was in no mood to strut.

W. and I on the train drinking our Plymouth gin from plastic cups. ‘How come you got more ice than me?’ He reaches over and grabs a handful of mine.

W.’s book on the table. ‘Cohen’ sighs W. ‘That’s what I should be reading, instead of talking idiocies with you.’

Then he tells me about calculus and God. ‘That’s why Rosensweig thought God existed. It’s all about calculus!’ W.’s dad tried to teach him calculus. W. didn’t understand a word. ‘I wasn’t ready.’ But W.’s found a website now. He does exercises.

A little later, he says, ‘We’re not religious. We’ve got no interest in religion. We’re not capable of religious belief.’

‘Do you like having a Boswell?’, I ask W. – ‘W. is a fiction. He’s not me’, says W. ‘I have to explain that to people.’ – ‘Do you like how I give you the best lines?’ – ‘Yes why do you do that? God, stop writing down everything I say. You’re even writing this down, aren’t you? It’s turning into a fucking Calvino novel!’

We’re lost on the campus, both drunk.

There’s always a point when you turn when you drink’, says W. ‘Normally you like me taking the piss out of you, but then you suddenly start getting offended. And then you’re absolutely rude. Rude and obnoxious.’ – ‘It’s a sign of friendship’ I tell him. ‘I’m not like that with anyone else.’

‘You’re like Blanche Dubois when you drink,’ says W., ‘maudlin and then vicious.’

‘Is it really called a man bag?’, I ask W. – ‘No. It’s just what I call it.’ – ‘What have you got in there?’ He begins to empty it. A book. Hermann Cohen on infinitesimal calculus, in the original. – ‘Wow! maths and German!’ – ‘See, I’m a scholar,’ he says. ‘Not like you.’ A notebook, which he writes in two different directions, following the practice of our friend P.

At the front, the ideas of others; at the back, his ideas. – ‘How many ideas have you had?’, I ask him. He opens the notebook for me. ‘Mmm. Quite a few. Can I copy some out?’ W. says I can. ‘A book must produce more thought than it itself has’, I write. ‘The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics’, I write. And the best one, ‘It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster’ – I copy that out, too. 

‘It’s too hot!’, I complain. W. reaches in his manbag for a wipe. ‘Rub the inside of your wrists and behind your ears’, he says, ‘it’ll cool you down.’ W.’s prepared for the heat, he said. He watched the weather forecasts. ‘Europe is either very hot,’ he says, ‘or very cold.’ He reaches in his man bag for suntan lotion, and applies it to his cheerful face.

W. is an enemy of sunglasses. ‘Take them off,’ he says, ‘you look like an idiot.’ But it’s sunny, I protest. ‘They block your pineal eye’, he says. ‘It needs sunlight.’ The pineal eye’s in the centre of your skull, W. explains, but it’s sensitive to light. Without light, you quickly become depressed. ‘That’s why you’re so morose’, says W. I’m morose, he says, whereas he, who doesn’t wear sunglasses, is joyful. ‘Joy is everything,’ says W., ‘I am essentially joyful.’

‘What have I told you!,’ admonishes W. as we board a train in Frankfurt. ‘This is public space. Pub-lic. That means outside your head.’ He points to my head. ‘Private’. And then out to the world ‘public.’ W. is a great upholder of this division. Abolish the public/ private divide and you abolish civilisation, W. always says. He looks around him contentedly. ‘See how quiet it is in Europe. It’s civilised,’ he says, ‘not like you.’

We are drinking. The European countryside rushes by. It’s so green! So fresh! And the buildings are so old. ‘Europe!’, I sigh. – ‘It’s a mystery to you, isn’t it?’  Even the names of the stations are intimidating, I tell W. ‘Think of everything that has happened here! All that history.’ W. takes it all in his strife, he says. Europe makes him gentler, better. It improves him. It’s the public spaces, he says. They’re so quiet in Germany. So calm.

W. says he’s more European than me. ‘You’re British,’ he says. ‘A British ape.’ We drink. ‘I can hold my drink’, says W., ‘I drink like a European, see?’ His glass is two thirds full. Mine’s empty. – ‘Can I have some of yours?’ – ‘Fuck off.’ I take out my notepad. ‘I’m going to write down our European thoughts.’ W. says he hasn’t had any yet. I tell him we should keep a record of our journey.

Later, and W. is in a contemplative mood. ‘Are you thinking of your Canadian boyhood?’, I ask him. W. is thinking of his many European trips. Back and forth across Europe, W.’s travelled. Not like me. ‘You haven’t been anywhere. Anyone can tell.’ W. is an experienced traveller. Take drinking, for example. He can pace himself, he says. Morning to night, he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret. ‘You should watch the Poles’, he says, ‘they’re experts.’ Poles – experts, I write down in my notebook.

W. is ill and so am I. But W. will never believe I am as ill as he is. I haven’t moved from my sofa in three days; he hasn’t moved from his in a week. I’ve done little but watch DVDs; he hasn’t been able to muster the concentration necessary to watch a DVD. I’ve lost my appetite, but W has forgotten he ever had an appetite. And above all, I’m capable of writing, ‘I’ve lost my appetite’, whereas W. hasn’t touched a keyboard for a week. ‘Even your illnesses are affectations’, says W.

In his illness, W. has been thinking only of his failure. ‘What have you been thinking about?’, he asks me, ‘celebrity gossip?’ Night and day, W. has been pondering why he has accomplished so little. ‘What have you been pondering?’, he asks, ‘what you’re going to make me say on your stupid blog?’ W. has decided I have no real sense of failure. ‘Even your sense of failure is a sham’, he says.

If he were to watch a DVD in his illness, says W., it would undoubtedly be Satantango. ‘Seven and a half hours, all in one sitting.’ I tell him I watched In Her Shoes. ‘It was really good. I like romantic comedies.’ Next up, Hulk. ‘An old favourite.’

W., who is really ill, as opposed to what he calls my fake illness, has been ill continuously over the past few months. For brief periods, his symptoms withdraw, allowing him to go into the office. I, who caught my illness from W. in the first place have also been ill off and on, but it is only intermittent, says W. ‘You’re basically healthy. Robust in your idiocy.’

‘You don’t know what it means to be ill, night and day. Like Kafka. Like Blanchot.’ W.’s illness is grand, mine is petty. His draws him closer to the masters, mine only reveals how far from them I have ever been. ‘What amazes me,’ says W., ‘is how they could ever write a line.’ W., in his illness, can write nothing. He rises early each morning in the hope he might accomplish something, but every day he is confronted by his own inability. Even the small task of writing our abstract is beyond him.

Has he, in his illness, heard the rumbling of bare existence?, I ask W. He says he thinks he hears it night and day, or it might only be me talking about celebrity gossip. Am I his Eckermann, or his Boswell? I ask W. He says I’m his ape, and, remembering Benjamin on Max Brod, that I’m a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.

W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill.’ I ask him whether his houseguest has gone. She has; and Sal’s still away, so his house is becoming like Howard Hughes’, he says. With bottles of urine everywhere? Exactly. Has he cut his hair and nails? No. ‘I’m like a wildman’, W. says.

Has he had any thoughts from his illness? None. Has his new book advanced any further? No. Has he written our joint abstract? No again. And what of your news?, he asks me. I tell him; it’s been a while; we haven’t spoken since Christmas. It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?, says W. What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you? Of what lines of flight are you dreaming?

I’m at my most idealistic at the start of the year, W. notes, whereas he’s at his most gloomy. Idiocy protects you, he says. He reminds me of my great follies in the past. ‘Do you remember your Hindu period? Your plans for a career in music? Your foray into business ethics?’ We both marvel at them. What’s it to be this year?, says W., go on, I need a laugh.

The new year! It’s always the same! New ideas! New follies! But W. is ill, and has no plans. Bottles of urine everywhere, hair and nails uncut, scrabbling through piles of unfinished writing, he staggers through the day.

‘You need a man bag’, says W., and shows me his. ‘You see? You can fit everything into it. Everything and anything.’ His bag sits on his hip, and hangs from a leather strap round his shoulders. He decides we should spend the day before the conference looking for a man bag for me. ‘You need to smarten up. Rucksacks won’t do. Man bags are the thing.’

‘What have you got in your man bag, then?’ I ask W. We’re on the train now, travelling North. ‘I’ll show you. A notebook.’ He places a large notebook on the desk. In the front, I write in black ink, and take notes from presentations.’ He shows me. – ‘Impressive.’ – ‘And in the back, I write in red ink, and develop my own thoughts.’ – ‘Doubly impressive.’ We both think back to our friend P. who taught us this trick. – ‘Of course P.’s intelligent. We’re not.’ I ask W. to see his notes. ‘What’s this drawing of a cock supposed to mean?’

Next, W. takes out his current reading. ‘Logique du sens. I don’t understand a word. Not – a – word. I don’t suppose you can help me, either.’ Next, he sets down a packet of moisturising wipes. ‘Very good for the skin. Calms you down. See, this is what going out with a woman teaches you.’ What else? ‘Nothing else. But I’ve got room for everything in my man bag.’ I tell W. his man bag is very continental. ‘Oh yes, I’ll bet Nancy has got one. And Agamben.’

The countryside is passing by. We’re in Scotland now. ‘Don’t you feel lighter? Isn’t the air fresher?’, says W. – ‘I feel freer somehow.’ – ‘So. What have you got in your rucksack? Go on, show me, I could do with a laugh.’ I take out a gossip magazine, and then another. I picked them up from our last train journey, without W. seeing. He gasps in horror. ‘My God, there’s no hope for you.’

Then some snacks. Nuts, first of all. ‘What kind of nuts are those? Can I have some?’ Then popcorn. ‘Popcorn? No wonder you’re getting fat.’ Then pretzels. ‘Where do you think you’re going? Up Everest?’ Then a book. ‘Load of shit. You read too much secondary stuff.’ Then my notebook. W. very pleased with this. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He flips through the pages. He’d taken it from me at another conference in order to write down his Hebrew question before he asked it. ‘See, that’s real Hebrew, that’, he says. ‘Ah, my Hebrew question! My finest hour!’ He’s quoted from the book of Genesis from memory, in Hebrew – we both remember that. ‘Ah! My genius!’

Then he tosses the notebook aside. ‘You should write from the front in black ink, and from the back in red ink,’ he says. ‘P. taught us that. Remember?’ – ‘He’s cleverer than us.’ Yes, W. concedes, he is. ‘So, what thoughts have you had? What would you write in red ink? Tell me. I need entertaining.’

We’re collaborating on a paper. W.’s written his half and brought a hard copy with him on his visit, formatted in the way W. likes to format things, with a title page with details of his name and affiliation. ‘There’, he says, giving to me. ‘Where’s yours?’ And then, knowing the answer, ‘Why can’t you ever finish anything on time? What’s wrong with you?’

It’s true, I never finish anything, no matter how many months I take to write something. There are always huge gaps – most of the paper – where I have to ad lib. ‘I like to watch you flail about’, says W. He has to admit, I’m quick on my feet. ‘You always think of something to say. It’s impressive.’ Sometimes, in our presentations, W. will turn very quickly to me and ask me to elborate on his point. I can always think of something. ‘I was checking to see if you were asleep’, he tells me later. ‘You looked asleep. It’s amazing how you can wake up like that. It almost makes you look intelligent.’

W. is certain his IQ is a few points higher than mine (‘it makes all the difference’), but he conceeds I may be quicker. ‘It’s you curse’, he says, ‘it means you never have to do any work.’ And then, ‘you’re lazy. La-zy.’ I tell him I’m nothing of the sort, that I spend months in preparation for any speaking engagement. I work hard, but it never seems to come together.

‘It’s my decline’ I tell him. ‘Ah yes, your decline.’ W. is as puzzled by this as anyone. ‘To what do you attribute it?’ – ‘I drink less coffee’. – ‘Yes, yes.’ – ‘My job is much more busy than yours.’ – ‘Undoubtedly. But I never thought of you as flappy, but that’s what you are, aren’t you? Flappy.’ I have been flapping about our paper, it’s true. My half wouldn’t come together. There’s W.’s, all printed out, with a title page, and there’s mine, handwritten notes, a few printed paragraphs, and vast gaps in which I will have to ad lib.

‘Something went wrong’, I tell him, ‘I’m not sure when. I think my brain is softening.’ I think of a cactus that was bought for me that fell prey to a disease. When I came back from a week away, it had rotted from within and collapsed upon itself. ‘That’s my brain’, I tell W. ‘It’s collapsed.’

W. finds this the collapse of his protege quite fascinating. ‘When did it all start going wrong? When did you first become aware of it?’ There’s something spectacular about my decline, W. decides. Something Faustian. ‘What kind of bargain did you make with the devil back then? How did you appear so intelligent?’ And then, ‘well, he’s carried your soul off now, hasn’t he?’

Then, in a spirit of diagnosis, ‘Describe your work day to me. What do you do?’ I get up very early, I tell him. ‘How early.’ – ‘Never later than six thirty.’ – ‘I get up at five. earlier sometimes!’ – ‘Then I do two hours of work.’ – ‘What kind of work? What does it involve.’ – ‘I read …’ – ‘What kind of reading? In the original language? Primary, rather than secondary?’

‘I write …’ – ‘Ah, that’s your problem. You try to write too soon. You have to slow down. Read more slowly. That’s why I read things in the original. To read more slowly.’ – ‘Then I go to the office.’ – ‘Ah, your office,’ says W., ‘that’s what stops you from writing your magnum opus, isn’t it?’

For his part, W. is busy on his introductory volume. He’s finished chapter two, he tells me. ‘It’s terrible. What I’m doing to Heidegger – my God!’ And then, ‘You should write an introductory book, you know. It’s good for you. You have to be clear. Cle-ar. You’re never clear, are you.’ I point out that he always said it was me who taught him clarity. ‘Not clarity, you fool. Idiocy! You taught me idiocy!’

A little later, ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ I tell him. – ‘You should do another book,’ says W., if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine at your blog. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces.’

No more books, I tell him. I’ve had enough. ‘Yes, I definitely think you should do another book. Look at you! You need help.’ W. had set some reading for me on another collaborative project we’re working on. The idea was to recommend one another five books to read, and then report back. ‘Have you read them?’ – ‘What do you think?’ – ‘And what am I supposed to read? Give me your list of five books.’ I tell him I’m working on that, too.

‘So, are you ready to speak tomorrow?’, says W. – No. God, no.’ – ‘I am.’ He waves his paper in front of me. ‘Are you going to let me down again?’ – Definitely.’ – ‘Actually, I think it’s funny. Everyone does.’ – ‘I can’t help it. My brain’s softening!’ – ‘No, it’s because you’re lazy. La-zee. And because of your stupid blog. You should give it up.’ – ‘I thought you liked my whining.’ – ‘Oh yes, like a sad chimp, at the limits of his intelligence.’ And then, ‘are you going to flap now? I like it when you flap.’ – ‘No, come on, it’ll have to do, let’s go for a drink instead.’

We’re always renewed, I tell W., when we set off once again to speak in Europe. Always young and uncowed, full of fresh hope and new happiness, toasting each other in foreign countries and falling down drunk in foreign gutters. Are we really that shameless?, I ask W. But perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we’re shameless or not: we’ll do exactly the same anyway and will be eternally surprised at the rediscovery of our own idiocy.

But are we really that innocent?, I ask W. Don’t we, at one level or another, know our own idiocy? Doesn’t it saturate our awareness to the extent we can know nothing else? But by some miracle, we always regain just enough innocence, just enough forgetting for it all to begin again.

I think this is why we’re so happy, I tell W. We’re always happy to be setting off on another of our adventures. And I think our happiness is why we are continually being invited everywhere; we’re popular because we’re happy, and because ours is the happiness of idiots. I think we remind people of the happiness of their own youths, and the sense that anything is possible.

For us, I remind W., the prospect of our adventures always fills us with happiness, and we are never more joyful than when contemplating the chance of another speaking engagement. It’s not that we don’t know we’ll disappoint everyone: we are under no illusions with respect to our abilities. Nor is it that we’ll make any advance at all with respect to our studies: we know they are perfectly futile, and that we have got nowhere.

It is the very prospect of travel and arrival; the very foreigness of those places to which we are invited that excites us. And we are invited, I remind W., and that is the miracle. We undoubtedly possess a certain kind of charm, for all our incompetence, or perhaps for reason of that competence. Idiots are charming, I tell W., at least initially. Of course, they soon wear out their welcome, and have no one to amuse but one another.

Do you remember the European professor who asked a whole circle of us how many languages we spoke, rather than read? ‘Oh we can read a whole bunch of languages …’ – ‘That’s not what I asked.’ None of us spoke a single language, of course. None of us had really been to Europe. He was disgusted, of course, I remind W. We were disgusted with ourselves, I remind him. We were mired in self-disgust, our whole circle. We hung our heads. If we could have hung ourselves at that moment, we would have done so.

In your 20s, I say to W., you are still permitted promise. ‘A promising young man’; ‘she really has potential’. Come your 30s, you are supposed to deliver. Everyone’s looking to you, everyone has faith in you, everyone’s hoping you’ll deliver, but we know in truth, that there will be nothing delivered, quite the contrary. And isn’t this the agony of your 30s, knowing that it will become very clear you are capable of nothing at all? The game will be up: it will be evident to all.

But somehow, we’ve escaped the crushing feeling of shame, I say to W. We’re endlessly crisscrossing Europe, but are completely free of shame! We know we should be ashamed, we talk about it constantly, but our actions attest to the fact that we think there’s still hope for us, that possibility remains possibility. It’s as though we were 21, I say to W. 21, and our whole life before us. But of course we are very far from being 21. We are at that age when we should have been crushed by our sense of failure. It should have winded us, we ought to be incapable of saying anything. And yet we are happy; we’re happiness itself. It is our idiocy that protects us, I tell W. It’s our idiocy that burns above us like a halo.

W.’s greatest flaw, he tells me, is that he believes that with a group of friends, a community, thought might be possible. It is what our friendship, after all, has singularly failed to accomplish: thought is, in fact, utterly impossible, for W. and for me, but especially for me.

I tell W. my greatest flaw is that I’m so mesmerised by my stupidity I can do nothing about it; that I sit and read my own prose in open mouthed horror until I’m afloat out over 60,000 fathoms, but no decision issues from my horror as it would from a sensible person.

I’m paralysed, I tell W., by my own inability, my signal lack of gifts. It amazes me. There’s nothing of which I am capable, I tell him. There’s no intellectual act I cannot sully; no sentence whose swift movement I cannot make stumble. In truth I stumble over myself, I tell him; I get in my own way. Were it not for the fact I existed, I tell him, I might have an idea.

And nor is funny, or surprising that I’ve never had an idea, I tell him. It’s quite obvious. It’s part of the course of things; its plain to everyone. In fact, I blame you, I tell W., for raising my hopes, for carefully nuturing my talents. Wasn’t I the only one who listened to you with your dreams of friendship and community?

But then, on the other hand, I tell him, you are free to blame me even as I have so singularly destroyed any hopes you had for spiritual friendship and intellectual community. In the end, I tell him, our friendship is founded upon the utter impossibility of our achieving anything at all.

‘Compare our friendship,’ says W. in my imagination, ‘to that of Bataille and Blanchot. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which takes place in the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, nothing survives, but nor should it. Of their near daily exchanges in the Paris of the early 1940s, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since you, like an idiot, put it all on your stupid blog.

‘Blanchot was above all discreet, but you are indiscretion itself; Bataille did not speak of his friend, but you are gossip and idle talk itself. Whereas both men were immensely modest, and weighed everything they said with great care, you are immensely immodest, and weigh nothing you say or write with any care at all. Whereas both wrote with great care and forethought, you write with neither care nor forethought, being seemingly proud of your immense idiocy.

‘How is it that we, who admire both the friendship between Blanchot and Bataille and that between Blanchot and Levinas have failed so signally in making anything of our friendship? I know: it’s entirely your fault. You’re an idiot.’

For my part, in my imagination, I tell W. that my absence occupies, for him, the same role as Palestine and manual labour did for Kafka: I am the correlate of his own inability, his own apishness. In truth, I tell him, we are both Brod, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, an apostle will not look out; when Brod looks into Kafka, only Brod looks back. You are my Brod, I tell W.; but I am your Brod, too. I am your idiot, but you are mine, and it is this that we share, in our joy and laugher, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

‘Literature softened our brains,’ says W. ‘We should have been doing maths. If we knew maths, we might amount to something. As it is, we’ll amount to nothing.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with literature per se,’ says W., who cannot go a day without speaking of Kafka, and takes his books to read to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe to read on his own, ‘but it’s had a bad effect on us. Besides, I bet Kafka was good at maths.’ – ‘He was good at law.’ – ‘Oh yes, law, it’s a bit like maths. Perhaps we should drop out and become lawyers. Perhaps that would be the making of us.’

‘Of course, it would different if we read literature alongside philosophy’, W. says, ‘but literature, for us, could not help infecting our philosophy. Yes, that’s where it all went wrong.’ – ‘But don’t you admire the fact that we feel something about literature? Don’t you think it’s what saves us?’ But W. is not persuaded. ‘It makes us vague and full of pathos. That’s all we have – pathos.’

Before beginning to give our collaborative papers, W. and I always dab our wrists and then the skin behind our ears with moisturising wipes. ‘It calms you down,’ W. said. ‘A doctor told me on a train.’ He takes his tissues everywhere with him. ‘I learnt it from Sal. You see this is what women can teach you.’

They were handy when we were travelling across Poland. We sat there with flushed faces until W. got his tissues out. ‘Dab your wrists, where women put on perfume, and then behind your ears’, W. told us, giving out tissues. Suddenly a marvellous coolness descended. ‘You see!’

W., on the train, is reading Thomas l’obscur. I was reading Agamben and shaking my head. Why do you keep shaking your head. ‘This is a terrible book! He got to the party too late. The party’s over! Why won’t he learn!’ – ‘What party? What are you talking about?’ – ‘He doesn’t feel anything. All this pathos, but it’s all fake. And he’s so programmatic! Listen to this!’ I read W. a passage. He’s impressed at my vehemence. I have certain instincts, W. allows. Occasionally I’m right, he tells me. ‘It’s like a chimpanzee who knows a storm’s coming, jumping up and down and screaming.’

Meanwhile, the Polish countryside flies by. There’s no beer on this train, to our chagrin. On the way out, we sat at round tables as in a cafe, and we were brought bottles of beer. It was joy itself: everything was there: good company, good beer, cheap salty snacks, the sense of adventure. But now we are going home. ‘How’s Thomas l’obscur?’, I ask W. – ‘Too clever for you, fat boy’.

Once, W. had dreamt of becoming a writer. ‘I was young then, and full of hopes and dreams.’ But he knew when to give up, he said. Philosophy came along. ‘I was good at philosophy once.’ W.’s great period is one of our conversational defaults. Others are 1) our stupidity, 2) my stupidity, 3) W.’s stupidity, 4) my obesity, 5) the state of my stomach, 6) the state of W.’s stomach, 7) The greatness of one or more of the following, a) Plymouth Gin, b) Bill Callahan, c) Will Oldham, 8) the cleverness of certain of our friends, relative to us, 9) maths, and our inability to do maths, 10) classical Greece and our inability to read it, 11) the trouble that literature has brought us.

‘It would different if either of us had literary talent’, says W., ‘do you think you have literary talent?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘I know I don’t have literary talent. But I don’t think you know.’ – ‘I never said I had literary talent!’ – ‘But you don’t deny it enough. Anyway, it’s very clear: you don’t have literary talent. And just so you know, you haven’t got any philosophical talent.’ – ‘Do you have any philosophical talent?’ – ‘I’ve got more than you. Just a little bit more, but that’s enough.’ – ‘Your IQ’s higher than mine, isn’t it?’ – Just a little bit, but that’s what separates us, man from ape.’ – ‘And you’re from a higher class than me, aren’t you?’ – ‘Yes. I have manners. You have no manners. And you’re continually touching yourself. Look at you: you’re doing it now!’ I take my hand out of my shirt. – ‘Why do you like touching your chest so much? Does it arouse you? Keep your hands on the table where I can see them. Read your book.’

The Polish countryside rushes by. – ‘It’s very flat in Europe’, I say. – ‘What about the mountains?’ – ‘I can’t see any mountains.’ – ‘Not here, you idiot. But there are mountains in Poland.’ – ‘It all looks flat to me.’ And then, ‘Right I’m giving up reading. I can’t when you’re about.’ – ‘You weren’t reading!’ – ‘I’ve read from here to here.’ W indicates a paragraph. ‘It’s so boring!’ – ‘What sort of literature would you write if you could?’ – ‘I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you.’

‘Literature,’ W. muses. ‘It’s our downfall. To be fascinated by something we can never, ever do. And it’s not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our head against it, over and over again, like idiots.’ – ‘But that’s our joy,’ I tell W., ‘it’s saves us.’ But W. is resigned. ‘You have to know what you can do, and what you can’t do.’ Then he looks at me. ‘Where do you think your strengths lie?’, and then, ‘Do you have any strengths?’ – ‘You know what I always say: we have to find something only each of us can do, and do that,’ I tell him. – ‘Oh yes?’ – ‘Pathos, in our case. We’re very good at that.’

When in doubt, W. and I pile on the pathos. We read with great pathos, and write papers of great pathos. Confronted by a potentially hostile audience, we attempt to wear them down with pathos. When there’s an audience more intelligent than us, exactly the same: the pathos trick. ‘I’m sure they know what we’re up to,’ says W., ‘but somehow they’re charmed by us. It’s our pathos.’

I close my eyes. ‘What are you contemplating? Your next magnum opus?’ And then: ‘you have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can’t do, in your case, everything.’ I look out of the window. ‘Europe is full of intellectuals’, I tell W., ‘they value the intellect out there.’ – ‘Do you think they’d value your intellect?’ – ‘I wish there was beer on this train!’ It’s hot. W. gets his wipes out. We dab our wrists and then behind our ears. ‘Ah, that’s better!’

‘Old Europe!’, I say to W. ‘We’ll never belong to it.’ We are passing through railway stations familiar to us from biographies of Kafka and novels by Sebald. ‘What is it, do you think? What’s wrong with us?’ W. is not sure, but he says it’s something we all share, the English. ‘The English disease’, he calls it.

‘The English’, I announce to W., ‘hate intellectuals.’ – ‘Oh yes, you’re an intellectual, are you?’ – ‘You see! You can’t even think of yourself as an intellectual. That’s because you’re English.’ – ‘I’m not English, I’m Canadian!’ – ‘You’re spiritually English, just as I’m spiritually English.’

I remind him of his photo album. Pictures of W., happy in Canada, with his family, who are likewise happy, and then pictures of W. in England. ‘The fall’, W. calls it. ‘The move,’ says W., ‘that’s when the disaster happened.’ His parents brought them back to England, to Wolverhampton. ‘Wolverhampton!’ says W., ‘can you imagine. Ah, what I might have been, had I stayed in Canada!’ He sighs.

Both of us dream of Canada. Academics are paid more there, and there’s more space. ‘That’s the problem with England,’ says W. ‘Overcrowding.’ But Canada is wide open. It’s the promised land. ‘Oh Can-a-da’ I sing, from Joni Mitchell. ‘If we made it to Canada, everything would be ok’, I tell W. ‘We’d breathe easier. We’d be unashamed intellectuals. We’d spread our wings. Imagine!’

W. is lost in a Canadian reverie. ‘We had a dog who was half-wolf, he says, ‘and she would follow me on my paper round, leading me by the arm. She took my hand in her mouth and led me, it was amazing. She never barked. And when we left, she starved herself to death, because she missed us so much. That’s loyalty.’

W. admires loyalty. In his paper on love, he called Sal, ‘small, blonde and fiercely loyal’. Someone asked whether she was a labrador. ‘You’re not loyal’, W. always insists. ‘You’d break the phalanx. You’d betray me – for a woman.’ He insists on this. When have I betrayed him in the past? ‘You will betray me,’ says W., ‘I’m certain of it.’

We speak about our friends from Canada. ‘They’re better than us,’ says W., and I agree. R. had told us he used to take his guitar round to his neighbours and they’d all sing together. ‘Do you think we would be singers, if we lived in Canada?’, I ask W. – ‘And dancers. Singers and dancers. Show me how you’d dance.’

I remind him of his Monkey Pirate Dance. ‘Ah yes!’, said W., ‘my high point!’ It was as a forfeit in a game of cards we made up at All Tomorrow’s Parties. I have pictures: W. with his trousers off, and Sal’s long tights pulled right up to his thighs, and an exuberant expression on his face, rolling from foot to foot, his arms bent. He sang a made up sea shanty: it was beautiful. ‘The Monkey Pirate Dance,’ says W., ‘how could I forget?’

‘We’d have grown up strong and true in Canada,’ I say to W. ‘We’d be men of the outdoors!’ – ‘Outdoors men! Exactly!’ W. used to apply for jobs in Canada. ‘There’s no point’, he laments. If only his family had stayed! But they came back. He was born over there, and they came back. ‘And that’s where it all started to go wrong,’ says W., ‘Wolverhampton! After Canada!’

‘Thank God I didn’t go to Oxford,’ says W., ‘that would have finished me. First Wolverhampton, then Oxford!’ He father said he couldn’t go to Oxford. ‘He was right!’ – ‘If you’d have gone to Oxford, it would have been too late.’ – ‘Canada,’ says W., ‘that’s where we should be. Things would be very different.’ – ‘But don’t you think it’s too late for us?’ – ‘It’s never too late,’ says W., except for you. You are, at heart, a betrayer. You will betray me for a woman.’

W. has seen Derrida dancing, he says. He does an impression. ‘The Derrida shuffle.’ It was on a balcony in Nice. ‘Everyone was dancing. Derrida was dancing, I was dancing …’ – ‘Do you think Levinas danced?’ – ‘Levinas was no dancer,’ says W. – ‘How about Nancy?’ – ‘Nancy was always too ill to dance.’ – ‘Heidegger played volleyball.’ – ‘Oh yes, Gadamer told me that.’ – ‘And Hegel, Schelling and Holderlin did a freedom dance around a tree.’ – ‘It was a freedom tree. There was no dancing.’

‘Come now,’ I say to W. later, ‘do you really think I’m a betrayer?’ – ‘Oh yes. You’re the type.’ – ‘Even if we moved to Canada?’ – ‘Oh yes. It’s a weakness in your soul. You’d betray me for a woman. You’d break the phalanx!’ – ‘What phalanx?’ – ‘The phalanx of our friendship,’ says W., grandly. Later, after coming in from the nightclub, we dance upstairs in W.’s lounge.

‘We’re non-dancers’, W. says. ‘But dancers admire non-dancers. They can’t dance like us.’ We remember dancing in Poland – your finest hour, W. says. I led Polish postgraduates in made up formation dances. ‘The Primal Scene!’; ‘The Return of the Repressed!’; ‘The Death Drive!’ – ‘It was beautiful’, W. remembers, ‘you’ll never have that many people following you again.’

‘Dance like a Canadian!’, I cry to W. in the upstairs lounge. He slides across the wooden floor in his socks and jumps onto the sofa. ‘Dance like an idiot!’, cries W. to me. I swing my arms like an ape. W. hums to the music loudly as he dances. ‘For dancers, we make good intellectuals,’ says W. – For intellectuals, we make good dancers!’, I say.

‘Love’, says W., reclining on his bed in the hotel room, ‘your favourite topic.’ – ‘Oh no. I’m not discussing love with you. Forget it.’ – ‘Why are you so afraid of love? Why?’ How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn?

Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal – this is always moving – but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another. ‘What do you think love is?’; ‘What is love, for you?’; ‘Have you ever loved anyone?’; ‘What do you consider love to be?’; ‘Do you think you’ll ever be capable of love?’; ‘What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?’

For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love. ‘You only love yourself,’ he says. It’s already very late, but in the hours before dawn, W. has decided to school me in loving. ‘Not sex!’ he says, ‘but love! Only you don’t know what that means.’

‘Your weakness is that you’re too susceptible to beauty. It’s your fatal flaw. It’s not about looks,’ says W. ‘Companionship. That’s what you need. If anyone needs a woman, it’s you.’ And then, ‘My God, look at you! You’re so scruffy. That jacket! You think you look attractive in that jacket, don’t you?’, says W. ‘It’s shapeless; it looks like a sack. It makes you look obese,’ he says, ‘which is why you always think you’re obese. In fact it’s the jacket that makes you look obese.’

W. keeps his suit very carefully for Saturday night, when he and Sal go out for cocktails. When I stay, and we go out for cocktails, he asks me, ‘What are you going to wear? You can’t go like that. Your shirt’s unironed, for one thing.’ W. says he’ll iron my shirt. ‘Go on, take it off.’ I take photographs of him doing up his shoelaces, ‘I’ve just polished these’, fag in his mouth.

‘How dry do you want them?’, the barman asks us. ‘Oooh, on a scale of one to ten, where ten’s driest, about eight please’, says W., the barman asks us what kind of Vermouth we want. W. tells him. ‘There are three kinds of Vermouth,’ W. tells me. I take a photograph of my Martini before I drink it. ‘When I’m feeling rich, I’ll buy you a Martini made from Navy strength gin,’ says W.

But in the hotel room, months later, all we have left to drink is Tequila. ‘The trick is, not to stop drinking’, says W. In Poland, he drank five shots in a row, stood up, and collapsed. ‘The Poles pace themselves,’ he says, ‘but we didn’t.’ And then, ‘where were we? Oh yes, love.’

Companionship, says W., is very important. It’s the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. ‘Sal and I get on,’ he says. ‘If you’re working class, like us,’ says W., ‘you show your affection by verbal abuse. That’s why I abuse you – verbally, I mean. It’s a sign of love.’ W. reminds me of what Sal said about a joint paper she saw us give: ‘"vague and boring." Vague and boring! It’s great. Your partner should be full of contempt for you. It’s a good sign.’

When we go out for cocktails, Sal always tells me to behave: ‘I don’t want any trouble out of you’, and then, to W. as well, ‘either of you.’ We have to behave. But as Sal gets more drunk, she gets lairy. Once, out for cocktails when they were staying with me, she fell asleep and then woke up disorientated and ready for a fight. ‘It’s your low body mass’, says W. to Sal, and then: ‘what do you think of his jacket? Disgusting, isn’t it?’ – ‘His jacket’s fine,’ says Sal. – ‘It’s velvet,’ says W., ‘no one wears velvet. And look at it! It’s cut like a sack!’

‘Why do you think you’re a failed as a lover?’, asks W. ‘What do you think you’re lacking? What’s missing in you? What crucial stage of development have you missed? Your parents brought you up properly, didn’t they? Then you’ve got no excuse. Yes, it’s your fascination with beauty that’s your problem. You’re not deep enough, romantically I mean. You need a woman who abuses you. That’s what you need.’

‘Sal has complete contempt for me,’ says W., ‘that’s how it should be. Your partner should always have contempt for you. Abuse is the key.’ W. takes me back through his romance with Sal. ‘It began with a mixtape’, he says. Before he met Sal, says W., he only listened to Gary Glitter and Mahler. Sal introduced him to Will Oldham. ‘You know what she put on my mixtape? "I Send My Love To You."’

‘Sal improves me,’ says W., ‘she makes me better than I am. That’s what you need.’ And then, after thinking a little, W. says, ‘you have to feel proud of your partner. Of her achievements.’ W. feels proud of Sal, he says. ‘Have you ever felt proud of someone?’, he asks me. ‘Are you proud of yourself?’

The living room is filled with examples of Sal’s ceramics. ‘We could never do that sort of thing,’ says W. ‘Look at us.’ But Sal, he says, has a natural gift. ‘She’s gifted. Not like us.’ He feels proud, he says. ‘All my friends prefer Sal to me. That’s a good sign.’ At the opening, he went to buy a piece of glassware without knowing who it was by. Sal, of course, had made it. ‘You see?’

All evening, Sal lairishly berates W. and I. ‘Why don’t you write your own philosophy?’ – ‘She’s right’, says W. ‘Why don’t we? You explain.’ And then, to Sal, ‘open your eyes! Isn’t it obvious!’ Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. ‘His book was better before he started working on it’, she tells me. It’s true, W. admits, that he cut so much of it that parts make no sense at all. ‘Still it’s better than your books, isn’t it? You should see his books,’ he says to Sal, ‘my God!’