Vale, Pollini!

GEORGE JOHNSTON

The Italian philosopher Pollini was born at the age of sixty-two years on the Greek island of Hydra on a bitterly cold March night in 1955. In a way, he came into the world more tempestuously than he deserved, for the man was a quietist at heart. Yet on that night in March a gusty sleet-laden boreás, blowing off the snow on the Peloponnese mainland and across the grey wild tumble of the Saronic Gulf seas, rattled the windows of Gregori’s tavern on the waterfront and had us all huddled around an inadequate charcoal brazier with our backbones freezing.

Arch-enemy of Sartre and the existentialists, doughtiest of crusaders against the materialism of the twentieth century, upholder of a virtuous paganism, intimate friend of Rilke’s widow, author of Erasmus and the Lost Way, The Kingdom of Lack, Epicurus—An Old Death and the New Transfiguration, etc., propounder of the complex system of metaphysics involved in his major hypothesis that “to want is to need”, Pollini crammed much brilliant intellectual achievement into his all-too-brief career, for he was dead before high summer had come to the island in that same year of 1955. (That he passed out of this world to a storm of Olympian laughter is a fact which he would, I think, have relished in his own particular way, and passed off with that characteristic philosophical shrug of his.)

There were, in the winter preceding the coming of Pollini, only seven of us foreigners living on the island. (They can hardly be counted now, even off-season, but this was true then.) We were all expatriates trying to be creative people. The island at that time was stricken by neglect and poverty and was falling into decay. A house could be bought for almost nothing and rented for even less. Living was quite possibly cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. So were wine and cigarettes. There were very good reasons for our presence.

Boardman the painter, a Californian, was here with his wife. The Frenchman, André, working with a primitive kiln and quick-flaring pine-brush from the mountains, was experimenting with pottery glazes. We had Pat Corrigan, an Irish writer from Dublin; Jenny, who was a sculptress, from Iowa; Sara Carson, a very beautiful Australian girl then aspiring to be a novelist. And myself.

In the years that have passed since those better days I have been outstripped by most of the others, but at the time of Pollini’s coming I was actually the one comparatively successful member of the group. I wrote suspense stories under a shamed pseudonym and novels which were pretty bad but which at that time I believed in and which were, at any rate, commercially published. I had even had a paperback reprint. Boardman at that time had nothing in the Museum of Modern Art, nor anywhere else: I seem to remember that he had not, in fact, sold a painting in ten years. Sara was labouring then on Summer Solstice, her first novel. Jenny had temporarily dropped sculpture for painting and was experimenting with a theory (later proved invalid) that Chinese art forms were applicable to the Greek landscape. Corrigan was writing short stories for the “little” magazines of high repute which were inclined to pay for contributions— if they paid at all—on the honorarium system. André was slowly going out of his mind with the problems of his kiln, for any change of wind would fracture the pottery he was baking. The wind was for ever changing. (It was not until several years later, when the rich tourists began to come, that the little terra-cotta Mycenaean horses and tomb figures which he so expertly forged turned the old kiln into a quite lucrative thing.) But I was the only one among us then who was making any money at all to speak of by trafficking with the Muses.

Still, we were a compatible and contented and hard-working group that first winter, living, for the most part on bean soup, halvah, bouillon cubes, sultanas, dry bread, goat cheese, and retsina, and enjoying stimulating arguments far into every one of the wild, wet, windy waterfront nights.

The upsetting intrusion into this world began some time in February, when a false spring had flung cascades of wistaria over the white walls and bombarded the town with explosions of almond blossom and carpeted the steep, stony hills with a million wildflowers.

It was a drift at first, but with a swift acceleration, so that before very long there must have been about eight of the newcomers sharing our tables in the taverns we favoured. They were all different, of course, but in some particular way they were also all the same. There were two Parisian existentialists (we did not have the word “beatnik” then, or at least we had not heard of it in Hydra), a youngish Swede travelling with a load of neurasthenia bigger than his rucksack, a Berlin youth who collected pornography, an American Negro called Brake who had lived for some precarious years in Munich, and three white Americans who were not physically all alike, but who had an astonishing similarity in the clothes they wore, in sexual propensities, and in the high skill they shared in the game of putting other people down intellectually. One, rather improbably, had been a taxi-driver in San Francisco, with certain vice strikes against him. His name was Werner. Rather dark stories were told about the other two, Prosser and Fellbecker; or, rather, not told so much as hinted at. They were men who, having suffered dissipation for a long time, were ageing out of their thirties rather alarmingly. I still remember those tight, pinched lines around their mouths. We gathered that they were supported by small but regular remittances from the United States (the figure was usually put at a hundred dollars a month), and it was more than rumoured that these emoluments were conditional on their staying permanently and far from their own country. In Fellbecker’s case there were sinister rumours of a wife mysteriously dead in Mexico and of certain inconclusive investigations. Prosser, in his cups and weeping, would sometimes give a blurred sort of significance to a never-very-clear tale of some bygone but still startling scandal in Philadelphia. They were completely “Europeanised”, for by this time they had both been expatriates for a good many years, during which their prowl had been the regular free-loader beat of Munich—Berlin—Paris—Majorca—-Ibiza—Tangiers—Ischia. Greece, though, was a new experience for all of them, and they were quite candid in admitting that they had been lured not only by the cheapness of living and the expansive hospitality of the people but also by the moral tolerance of the Greeks. They had all known each other before, of course, at various points on the prowl.

The newcomers favoured tight blue jeans and either striped T-shirts or roll-neck sweaters, depending on the weather. All wore their hair very long except the young Frenchman, Jacques, who favoured the Roman fashion of the Caesar busts, and his mistress Francine, who wore hers cropped like a boy’s. Jacques also wore one gold ear-ring. Francine displayed the jawbone of a dog on a leather thong around her neck. (The French couple, being man and woman, as it were, had this sharp distinction from all the others in the matter of sexual predilection. Jacques, however, was faithful to a principle rather than to a person, and bis eyes fell at once and contemplatively upon the delectable Sara.)

The striking thing about all of them was their apparently immense cultural erudition. In some mysterious fashion (by mail perhaps, for they were everlastingly writing or receiving letters: they lived poste restante, and often their letters came with as many as six or seven re-addressings) they seemed able to keep up with every breath of change and fashion in the intellectual climate of the world. They knew the latest reviews of all the best plays, books, movies, art shows, ballet, music, and could even drop selected quotes from their favourite iconoclasts. They always knew who was “in”, who was “coming”, and who was slipping. They could—and would, in almost every conversation—quote in the most chastening manner from Gide, Proust, Rimbaud, Brecht, Mallarmé, Auden, Baudelaire, Henry James, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein. Also from Joyce, Lawrence, Sartre, and Beckett. And many more. They shared a vast fund of amusingly malicious personal anecdotes which pointed up their earlier intimate friendships with Auden, Picasso, Graves, Dali, Alice Toklas, Hemingway, Noel Coward, Nancy Cunard, Norman Douglas, Stravinsky, Dylan Thomas, and Rilke’s widow. (Werner also had quite warm spots for Farouk and Gracie Fields.) Names like Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Marx, Jung, Freud, and Santayana dropped like cigarette-ends, with the relevant quotations, and all the casual aplomb of somebody asking for the salt to be passed. They also talked nonchalantly about the book they were writing, the volume of poems shortly to be published, the play being finished, or the one-man show of abstracts which had been fixed for the Galerie Rive Droite. (Their conversation was, in fact, the only evidence one ever had of these accomplishments or intentions, since they never seemed to move out of reaching distance of the post office.)

The fact remained that little more than a week of their company was almost enough to reduce the rest of us to a dismal recognition that we were nothing but a bunch of Goths and morons. Ignorant, inarticulate, intellectually barren. Sterile. Hopeless. They put us down, intimidated us, cowed us. They were condescending, yes, but we were never in doubt that they despised us, even if they did go to some pains to dissemble their contempt. There was, of course, a reason for this. To put us down, to blow away as so much cultural dust any self-confidence we might have possessed, this they felt to be necessary, and in any case the task to them was an enjoyable one. But to have displayed their scorn too openly would have been unwise, for here certain economic angles were involved, and these angles were not to be jeopardised by any over-rash or too-blatant assertion of their superiority.

I was in the somewhat curious position of being the main target for both their disdain and their economic acumen. I wrote a commercial “slick” type of story, which in itself was hard to forgive: the fact that I was actually published put me quite beyond their pale. None the less, this was a bullet they had to bite on, and on the whole they did manage to veil their distaste, since I was about the only one with any money at all. They all drank very heavily. And somebody, after all, had to be left to pick up the bill, or to pay for their food in the taverns, or to “hold them” until such time as American Express forwarded on their remittances. I laboured for a time under the delusion that if I lent them enough they would have to stop “borrowing” from me because of shame at owing so much and not repaying it. It was only later that I saw my own naïveté. They would have considered my paltry contributions as less than fair payment for their evangelical work of bringing culture to the barbarians.

There was the day Fellbecker came to the house, for instance, to borrow another hundred drachmas from me. He was particularly flattering that morning. He spoke of my “solidity”, assured me that I was “all of a piece”, and confessed rather wistfully to how deeply he envied a “really integrated guy”. After I had given him the money I watched, unseen and morose, from the upper window as he went down the stairs to the courtyard. There he paused, turned his back very formally to the front door, stooped over rather in the manner of an ibis bending for a doomed minnow, broke wind with a sound like a burlap bag ripping, and went out through the front gate snorting his disgust. Prosser, on a more or less similar occasion, varied the gesture of contempt. Having stuffed the borrowed money into his jeans he simply made an unmistakably obscene gesture at the house and said “Banality!” in a snarling tone that was both withering and audible. A further complication at this stage was that Jacques had abandoned Francine to a fisherman in the next village and was pursuing Sara Carson (who happened to be my woman) with a cocksure Gallic fervour and a supercilious disdain for our philistine concern.

It was into this exasperating and, indeed, undermining situation that Pollini came.

It was Boardman, I believe, who ventilated the issue. The seven of us were crouched in a huddled circle over the grey coals of Gregori’s brazier on that frigid late March night, the other more recent arrivals having gone off somewhere to pick up sailors. The wind snarled at the night and thudded shutters. “Say, we’ve got to do something,” Boardman said, in genuine distress. “Those bastards are driving me nuts. Driving all of us. I can’t work at all now. You can’t work. None of us can work. We don’t even have any talk any longer. Only their goddam talk.”

“Then it’s quite simple,” said Pat Corrigan. “We must introduce our own man. Not theirs. Ours.”

We all looked at him questioningly, but his thin Irish face had grown reflective, and he buried his head in his long pale bony hands. “Pollini,” he said at last, after some thought. “Yes. It has the cadence of a name half-remembered. Heard somewhere. It strikes a chord. Pollini,” he said experimentally. “Acoustic associations are there, you see. Bellini. Puccini. Boldini. Bernini. Cellini. There is something about it that’s in the ear, don’t you see? Pollini,” he said again, mouthing the name, and then looked up at us. “Luigi Gabriele Pollini,” he said carefully. “He has the chair of philosophy at Bologna now. He was born at Padua, of course, in 1893— so that would make him ... let me see ... sixty-two, wouldn’t it?—but he’s been at Bologna for donkey’s years. Highly respected. Did any of you come across that last book of his, The Kingdom of Lack! Terrific. It’ll get him a Nobel, you mark my words.”

There was a pause, in which we all looked at him blankly, and then:

“He wouldn’t accept it,” said Boardman, catching on. “Not Pollini.”

“And why shouldn’t he?” put in Jenny. “Rilke’s widow maintained he should have had it years and years ago. When he was pushing that Neo-paganism movement. Lord, you can’t say he wasn’t an influence, can you? Or still is, for that matter.”

“I’m not thinking of that angle,” Boardman objected. “It’s the man himself. His own temperament and attitudes. His sense of integrity, if you like. Well, the great thing about the guy. I remember discussing Pollini’s character with Tom Eliot. We were having tea together at his publisher’s place, looking out over the trees in Woburn Square, only a year after Tom had gotten his own Nobel. It must have been late autumn, because I can still see that yellow mulch of soggy leaves squashed all over the pavements . . .”

It came quite easily. Glibly, almost. We were able to do it just as well as they did.

Even so, it took quite a long time to get Pollini firmly established on the island.

Corrigan took over the biographical side, and, in thirty-six foolscap pages typed in single-spacing, meticulously detailed the philosopher’s life from his birth in a Paduan slum alley, through the many vicissitudes of his childhood and early youth, to the colourful reckless days of his association with d’Annunzio, on to his interest in philosophy developing as a result of his friendship with Benedetto Croce (Pollini attached an almost mystical significance to the fact that Croce’s first philosophical essay, History Subsumed Under the General Concept of Art, was published on the very day of Pollini’s birth in 1893), and the jubilation of the young Paduan philosopher at Henri Bergson’s excited reaction to his now-famous first essay, To Want is to Need—An Examination of Intuition, in which Pollini had found call for four separate and distinct meanings for the word “exist” where Kierkegaard had been satisfied with only three. (Pollini retained something very close to worship for Bergson right up until the Frenchman’s embittered death in 1941: he attached an almost mystical significance to the fact that Bergson had been born in 1859, on the very day on which Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared.) Corrigan left nothing out—Pollini’s romantic but ill-judged involvement with Berthe Lancelli the contralto, his reckless but heroic role with d’Annunzio in the attack on Fiume, his strange sentimental attachment to d’Annunzio’s mistress of long years before, the great but aged Eleonora Duse, his long and unrelenting feud with Sartre, those wild controversies aroused in the Southern states during his second sensational lecture tour of the U.S.A., the ceaseless barrage of polemics with which he harried the Fascist authorities from his quiet entrenchment within the walled cloisters of the University of Bologna, his long quarrel with the Vatican which would have brought about his excommunication but for the fact that at the critical moment Pollini was taken ill with pneumonia and half the population of the province of Emilia crowded to the University gates to read the bulletins on the sick man’s condition, his long and affectionate correspondence with the Rilkes. It is perhaps a testimony to Pollini’s life and character that the work was done with so much care and devotion.

Sara Carson’s task (luckily she had worked for some time in the Mitchell Library in Sydney) was the compilation of the Pollini bibliography—his books, papers, essays, lectures, the several extant versions of the famous Milan Manifesto, the so-called “commentaries”, and even a detailed appendix of his letters—and also a complete list of his honorary degrees from and guest professorships at foreign universities.

My job was to develop a succinct précis of the main principles of Pollini’s philosophy, his theories, postulations, and commentaries, critical analyses of his books, and a list of quotations from his writings to meet almost every foreseeable contingency.

Luckily, April came in with heat in the sun, warm enough to tempt Sara and me down to the sea rocks near the cave. By this time we were both feeling a need for relief from our long hours of scholarship, an hour or two of freedom, as it were, from Pollini, from the volumes of philosophy that littered my desk and the pages of plagiarism that bulged my folders. The day bubbled and sparkled like vintage champagne. The shadows of the cactus were dense and black against the crimson cliffs. It was one of the true times of the halcyone and the gulls really did seem to be nesting on the blue milk of the peaceful sea.

But the rocks were under annexation and a transistor radio was playing. They were all there—Prosser, Fellbecker, Werner, Brake, Jacques, Francine, the lunatic Swede and the dirty-minded boy from Berlin—all there on the rocks, on our rocks, like a slime of stranded jellyfish.

“Oh God!” I groaned. “Are they taking this over too?”

People always look so different with their clothes off. Prosser and Fellbecker, in their faded V’s, were flabbier than one had realised and they had sagging, rather mournful rumps and a quantity of bruises. On Francine the dog’s jawbone as a striking feature took second place to the puckered scar of an appendectomy which marked like a fingerpost the salient area of her scant bikini. Werner and the Berlin boy, the one with bruises and the other with acne, were, with much giggling, pretending to practise judo holds. Only Jacques, among them all, was impressive. Chillingly impressive. His superb body glittered as gold as the ring in his ear-lobe. He had a token scrap of paisley around his loins and a wild caper flower between his teeth, and his eyes, cool in appraisal and torrid in intention, began speculatively to undress Sara. “Let’s get back to Pollini,” I muttered cravenly, and took her by the hand and led her away.

On the way back we called in at Boardman’s place, an old derelict sponge-warehouse dignified by the euphemism “studio”. There were several crayon sketches pinned to the crumbling, scaly walls, and from these Boardman was just working the final touches to a life-size portrait in oils.

“Well, it has to be from memory, of course,” he said, with a little shrug of deprecation. “Sort of. What do you think, though? Not bad?”

“But . . . but it’s absolutely marvellous!” Sara cried. “You’ve caught the likeness perfectly. I mean it’s him!’

We knew at once it was Pollini, of course. And the likeness really was remarkable. One still remembers the wild, untamed frizz of fox-pelt hair, the clear lined brow above the intensity of eyes like black olives, that great crag of a nose, the heavy, even rather sensuous mouth that yet had something of the tender mobility of a woman’s, the two curious warts on either side of the deeply cleft chin which later we would always jestingly refer to as Scylla and Charybdis.

“Now those sons of bitches have taken over the sea,” I complained to Boardman. “They’re littered all over the rocks by the cave. We can’t work. We can’t talk. Now we can’t swim, either.”

“Patience,” said Boardman. “Remember Pollini’s dictum. ‘Transvaluing is a concern of our full freedom, and is opposed to all cognitive attitudes.’ We must find comfort in that.”

“Comfort in what? What the hell does it mean?”

“How should I know?” said Boardman. “I looked it up in one of your books. Some guy called Husserl. It sounded nice.”

We did the memorising and the rehearsals in Boardman’s studio, partly because the others, having dismissed Boardman as a quite penniless paint-slinger, had never troubled to find out where he lived, and partly because it was somehow comforting to work beneath the penetrating, intelligent gaze of The Master, framed now in slats of boxwood and honourably centred on the studio wall. Also Boardman always kept a wicker-covered flagon of brandy on hand.

The compilation of all the data had taken us two whole weeks of hard work. To fix it in all our minds and to thoroughly rehearse our roles occupied another ten days, and during this time Andre and Jenny turned out some twenty-odd small portrait busts of Pollini (taken from Boardman’s portrait and sketches) in terra-cotta clay. The weather remained balmy and all the busts came out of the kiln unbroken. “Each of us should have one,” said Corrigan. “Later in the summer we should be able to flog the left-overs to the tourists.”

During this rehearsal period something happened which was temporarily rather disconcerting. There were two new arrivals, a young man and a young woman. The man, whose comparative immaturity was cleverly concealed behind an immense black beard, was the disconcerting one. He introduced himself crisply on the waterfront, with a stiff little bow and a Germanic click of heels.

“Carol Caliesch. Swiss. I am pleasured,” he said, and flourished a card at us. There was his name printed. And his calling. Philosopher, it said. Quite clearly in type two points larger than the word “Zurich”.

The young woman was not introduced. I think eventually we learned that her name was Vicki. She was simply the philosopher’s moll. There is just no other definition. Dark, intense, de-sexed, plain, the thick accents of her native New Jersey carefully overlaid with a feigned Middle European broken English, she was both “feed” and “clacque” to the Biblically-bearded Swiss. She was rehearsed, loyal, and adoring, with her breathless “Oh yes! Oh yes!” to his every observation on or quotation from Hegel or Kafka or Kant or Lorca. She always stood or sat very close to him, her eyes subdued into her flesh, her flesh into her dark and rather sweaty shirt, her feminine personality into a murmurous echo-box of approval and admiration.

They left us to find a cheap room. His handshake had the limpness and the slightly clammy unpleasant touch of a used church candle. He left me feeling very troubled, and that afternoon I voiced my misgivings to the others in Boardman’s studio: “Well, he is a philosopher. It says on his card. The minute we open our mouths he’ll just shoot us down.”

Corrigan, however, had also met the Swiss, and was not in the least dismayed. “Him?” He snorted. “Are you barmy? Holy Mary, Pollini will just eat him and spit the bones out! I mean, if Pollini can maul Sartre! And Wittgenstein . . .”

Still, there must have been something inhibiting in the coming of the philosopher because that night passed without Pollini’s debut, and so did the following night, and the night after. We were all indoctrinated, rehearsed, word-perfect, and we sat like mutes around the table while the names and quotations and the unstanched dribbles of their erudition dropped as the gentle rain from the lips of Prosser and Fellbecker and Brake upon the place beneath.

“As Rilke nicely put it, ‘I am nobody and always will be,’” Prosser on the fourth night was saying cleverly, reaching for the ouzo, meaning us, of course, and not himself, and only quoting anyway just to put us down.

“Pollini always questioned that,” Boardman said with a deadly calm. We all sat up at once.

“Who did?” asked Prosser, startled.

“Pollini. He refers back to it in one of his letters to Rilke’s widow. I guess you know it. Well, ‘Ich bin niemand und werde auch niemand sein,’ Pollini refused to reconcile the non-existence of ‘nobody’ with the infinite existence implied by ‘always’. Okay, he’s got something. On the grounds of logical positivism, Pollini had to take a stand, I guess. Regardless of the verse.”

“Who was that?” Fellbecker asked with caution.

“Pollini,” said Boardman.

“Ah,” Fellbecker murmured guardedly.

“Like Occam’s Razor,” Corrigan said with a grin. “I’ve always thought Pollini was sharper, though.”

“Occam’s Razor, yes,” said the Swiss philosopher. He spoke with very little conviction, but the girl sitting next to him whispered, “Oh yes! Oh yes!”

We dropped it at that, and three nights passed before Pollini’s name was mentioned again. Our confidence had been restored, so that this time it was we who took the initiative.

“Did any of you,” asked Sara, “read Quintland’s piece on Pollini in New Comment?’

“Oh, who the hell cares about Quintland?” said Boardman dismissively.

But I wanted to know, so I said, “I’ll bet anything you like it was anti-Pollini.”

“Of course,” said Sara. “It’s presented as a critical analysis of the book. Quintland maintains that it’s nothing more than thinly disguised Communist propaganda. That it’s politics, not philosophy . . . well that Pollini’s Kingdom of Lack is the whole of the Western World outside the Iron Curtain.”

“What absolute bollocks!” said Corrigan. “Oh, the book’s an allegory, of course it is ... a marvellous, tremendous allegory, but can’t imbeciles like Quintland see that the Kingdom of Lack is man’s own soul? Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Not Quintland,” said Jenny. “He can’t see anything but red spots before his eyes.”

I thought that none of the others would have anything to say. Werner floated a blob of cigarette ash on a puddle of slopped wine, pushing it around with a toothpick. Fellbecker broke matchsticks on to the table. The philosopher was staring away into space, muttering something inaudible, and the girl beside him seemed to be trying to read his lips. It was Prosser who looked up carefully and said, “You still have that magazine?”

“Sorry. Not any longer,” said Sara. “I wrapped up the potato peelings in it. I rather felt that was about what it was worth. But you get New Comment, André, don’t you?”

“Ah yes,” said André, shrugging. “But my copy I stoke ‘er in the kiln.”

“Too bad,” said Prosser, and looked away.

“Tant pis,” said André.

We had to be very careful in the days and nights that followed never to overdo it. The name of Pollini came into our discussions more frequently, of course, but always we introduced it deftly and only where it was warranted.

Boardman and Corrigan were enthusiastic and I think anxious for an all-out assault, but I was rather cagey about the opposition, especially Prosser and Fellbecker. On two separate occasions, when they called on me to borrow money, I noticed that each of them made a rather too studiedly nonchalant examination of what books were scattered around. Neither of them said anything, though. Still, Prosser was obviously a little distrait because he was almost at the bottom of the stairs before he remembered what he had come for and had to walk all the way up again to ask me for the money. This so delighted me that I pressed fifty drachmas on him, although I had sternly promised myself that this time he should have twenty at the outside. He looked quite dejected leaving the house and made no obscene gesture of any sort.

Two days later the philosopher called on me to see if I had a German-Greek lexicon—this was the pretext, anyway—but I had the feeling that he had come to talk about something which he could not quite get round to putting into words. I saw him looking at the little terra-cotta bust of Pollini which stood on the shelf above my desk.

“Pollini,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “A fine head. Distinguished.”

“Well, it’s not all that good a likeness. They’re just gimmick things you pick up for a few lire around Bologna. In Emilia they turn them out by the drayload. Tourists grab ‘em, mostly. And students passing through, of course.”

It was that same night that Corrigan, with telling emphasis, decisively won an argument with the Swiss simply by referring to Pollini’s attitude in the controversy with Bertrand Russell on Intuitive Pacifism.

It was hard to restrain them after that. Corrigan’s view was that with all the detailed data in our minds, with a hundred Pollini quotations at our fingertips, with the man’s whole life and character as vivid to us as if he really existed, with Boardman’s splendid portrait there in the studio—the Grand Old Man of modern European philosophy looking down at his devoted disciples from that sombre, heavy, intelligent face —how could we fail?

I was still for caution, but in fact circumstances themselves forced an acceleration in the campaign. It was the opposition now who seemed intimidated. They dropped names and quotations less spiritedly and far less frequently. They were inclined now to listen warily where before they had dominated every conversation. All this, of course, made more room for Pollini. Indeed there was one night when Boardman was obliged to keep the conversation going for a whole hour. He handled it superbly, I must say, even though he had to ad lib a good deal of it, and he had the rest of us in stitches with his anecdotes about Pollini’s charming but somehow grotesquely absurd love affair with the singer Lancelli.

That must have been a specially disconsolate night for the opposition—normally there were only reviews to be discussed, analogies to be drawn from the Pollini texts, or quotations allowed to fall partly around the littered tavern tables—and it had a distinct effect.

The despondency—uncertainty? suspicion? frustration? . . . whatever it was—must have been contagious. Jacques, who for days had been gnawing dispiritedly at his lower lip instead of trying to get his leg under the table and rub it against Sara’s, went on a violent drunk that night, tried to smash up a fisherman’s tavern, got two teeth knocked out by an accommodating gri-gri boatman, and went whimpering back to Francine. The police expelled both of them from the island the following day. Werner, Brake, the mad Swede, and the Berlin connoisseur went back to their sailors.

Only Fellbecker and Prosser and the philosopher and his moll doggedly stayed on with us. But the strain clearly was beginning to tell. They were for the most part taciturn and moody, disheartened, almost absent-minded in a way. There was even a night when Fellbecker paid for the drinks. Certainly he did it in a dull, mechanical way, like a man hypnotised. But still he did pay. We were so delighted with Pollini at this stage that not only did we award him the Prix de Rome, we also sent in his nomination for the Nobel.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am they’ve done that,” Jenny said.

“Done what?” I cued.

“Nominated Pollini for the Nobel Prize,” she said. “They must give it to him, mustn’t they?”

“Oh yes. Oh yes!” the philosopher’s moll whispered breathlessly.

The climax came the very next night. Again Boardman had been obliged to move in to breach another dark and brooding lull in the conversation, and he was explaining to the philosopher, in the simplest terms, something of Pollini’s theories on the nature of personal egotism. “You see, he defends it,” said Boardman, “on the basis that there is a natural intuition towards self-aggrandisement, whereas modesty, for example, is nothing more than an artificial and imposed convention.”

“Oh, crap!” Fellbecker exploded suddenly.

Boardman turned to him slowly, his eyebrows raised.

“I disagree absolutely,” said Fellbecker angrily.

“Is that so?” said Boardman. “Well, so do a lot of other people. Your buddy Sartre, for instance, would contend—”

“I’m not talking about Sartre,” Fellbecker snapped at him. “Nor anybody else. I’m disagreeing with your cockeyed interpretation of Pollini’s dialectic.”

“Why the hell are you anti-Pollini?” Corrigan came in rather aggressively.

“He’s not anti-Pollini,” Prosser squeaked. “It’s just that your superficial approach to—”

“You keep out of this,” said Corrigan threateningly.

“Lay off it, Pat,” said Boardman. “I want to hear what Fellbecker’s got against Pollini.”

“I’ve got nothing against Pollini,” Fellbecker said stonily. “I’m objecting to your half-baked interpretations. To hear you talk you’d think he was the only goddam philosopher who ever lived. Pollini! Pollini! Pollini! So all right. You rate him that high why don’t you try, for God’s sake, to get him right? The way you all talk you make like he’s the only contemporary philosopher in Europe. And even if he were, don’t you think we owe it to him to see that his message isn’t garbled and tangled and twisted around into . . . into pap that any moron can swallow without discomfort?”

“You’re all so superficial,” shrilled Prosser. “That’s what I said. You all—” He broke off suddenly and stared at Corrigan. We all did.

He was peering across at Fellbecker and there was that glassy fixed intensity in his eyes that one normally saw only towards the end of one of the ouzo jags he would get on whenever he received a rejection slip. “Pollini’s message . . . pap for morons . . . Pollini’s message . . .” He mumbled the words thickly, and almost absently, as if everything had become too difficult to remember. His head sank slowly into his long thin hands, and there was an interval when he was quite silent and motionless, and then his shoulders began to shudder and jerk convulsively until all the glasses on the table were rattling, and he was gasping in a kind of strangled, choking way. He gave one snort, took a deep careful breath, raised his head, opened his mouth, and laughed. His eyes were streaming. His laughter bellowed and brayed at the ceiling. Boardman jumped up and reached a restraining hand towards him, but his arm fell helplessly among the dancing glasses on the table, and he began to laugh too. In seconds all seven of us were laughing: roaring, fist-pounding, gut-wrenching laughter that sent the table over and all the bottles and glasses and two chairs crashing to the floor; and everybody else in the tavern stared at the seven of us as if we were mad.

They all left on the steamer for Athens the following afternoon. They paid none of their debts, returned none of the books they had borrowed, and they did not even stop by the tavern to say goodbye or to have a final drink or to pick up the little terra-cotta busts of Pollini we had brought along for each of them. We were a little regretful about the busts, but even that didn’t really matter. They had all gone.

All, that is, except the philosopher and his moll. They stayed on. They had begun a poetry phase, and Lorca was the boy, and they were reading Blood Wedding to each other, but the philosopher hadn’t really caught on at all because he stopped Corrigan outside the post office two days after the others had left the island.

“You have in your house the books of Pollini?” he wanted to know.

“No,” Corrigan told him curtly.

“Not? Some articles, perhaps? A treatise?”

“No,” said Corrigan. “Pollini’s dead.”

“Ah, but of course, yes. I am aware.” His lips showed pink through a gap in the black beard. “But bis books, they are available, no?”

“No. They cremated Pollini. In Bologna. All his writings were burnt with him. That was his wish.”

“So?” The philosopher seemed both surprised and a little crestfallen. “Ah yes, this is sad,” he said. “A great sadness, I think. I stay here now all through the summer. I would much wished to have studied him more than I have done. A very interesting philosopher.”

“Yes,” said Corrigan. “He was all that”