The Last Samurai

I thought about another day like the last 17, 10 hours of marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius; I thought about another day like yesterday, more marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius plus nonsense about elite bands not to mention 10 hours explaining every single word/visiting toilet inaccessible to pushchair/ smiling pleasantly through 273 verses (10 + 0 + –262) of the green bottles song. Could I be sure that he would not start up again at –263 or rather would anyone familiar with the child offer even straight odds that he would not? No.

So I said All right, forget the Circle Line. We’ll take Cunliffe and we’ll go to the National Gallery, but I don’t want you to say ONE WORD. And no running through doors that say No Entry or Authorised Personnel Only. We’ve got to be inconspicuous. We’ve got to look as though we’ve come to look at the paintings. We’ve been looking at the paintings and our feet are tired so we’re just sitting down to rest our feet. We’re just sitting down to rest our feet so we can get up and look at more paintings.

Natürlich, said the Phenomenon.

I’ve heard that one before, said I, but I put Cunliffe under the pushchair along with Odyssey 13–24, Fergus: Dog of the Scottish Glens, Tar-Kutu, Marduk, Pete, WOLF!, Kingdom of the Octopus, SQUID!, The House at Pooh Corner, White Fang, Kanji ABC, Kanji from the Start, A Reader of Handwritten Japanese, this notebook and several peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I put L in the pushchair with Les Inséparables and we set off.

We are now sitting in front of Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge. L is reading Odyssey 18, consulting Cunliffe at intervals—infrequent intervals. I have been looking at the Portrait of the Doge—somebody’s got to.

I have brought things to read myself but the room is so warm I keep falling asleep and then jerking awake to stare. In a half-dream I see the monstrous heiskaihekatontapus prowling the ocean bed, pentekaipentekontapods flying before it, Come back & fight like a man, it jeers, I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back (heh heh heh). Strange to think Thatcher could work on three hours sleep, five hours & I am an idiot. Should never never never have told him to read all those things—but too late to retract.

I think the guard looks suspicious.

Pretend to take notes.

No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.

The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.

I wanted to clear my head. I wanted strangeness and coldness and precision.

I listened for a little while to Glenn Gould playing pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier. In recording sessions Gould would often make nine or ten different versions of a piece, each note perfect, each perfectly distinct from the others in character, and each note played bears the mark of all those to which it was preferred. I am not really capable of replaying a fugue in my head so I listened to his queer performance of the C minor prelude, Book 1, which begins with each note staccato, and then two-thirds of the way down the first page the notes suddenly run very smoothly and softly, and then I listened to Prelude No. 22 in B flat minor which I could never play without the pedal. I think that though perhaps it should not be played with the pedal it should at least be played legato, and yet the harsh abruptness with which Gould plays this piece displaced with its coldness, its lack of ease, the wilful expressiveness with which Liberace wearies the heart.

Liberace was still asleep. His head lay on the pillow, face as I had seen it, skull encasing a sleeping brain; how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep. I did not want to watch him wake to go on as he had begun.