Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: England, Villages, General, Fiction - General, Boys, Fiction
ISBN: 9780676974966
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2006-04-11T03:08:50.152000+00:00

‘Are you a poet?’ (I’d nearly said ‘too’.)

‘No. That title is hazardous. But, I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and,’ she uttered the word like a pantomime witch, ‘“elope”! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as…épouvantail, a – how you say the man in a field who frights birds?’

‘Scarecrow?’

‘Scarecrow. Exactly. So I tell him, “Go to the hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!” He consented my logic. Poets are listeners, if they are not intoxicated. But novelists,’ Madame Crommelynck did a yuck face, ‘is schizoids, lunatics, liars. Henry Miller stayed in our colony in Taormina. A pig, a perspiring pig, and Hemingway, you know?’

I’d heard of him so I nodded.

‘Lecherousest pig in the entire farm! Cinematographers? Fffffft. Petits Zeus of their universes. The world is their own film set. Charles Chaplin also, he was my neighbour in Geneva, across the lake. A charming petit Zeus, but a petit Zeus. Painters? Squeeze their hearts dry to make the pigments. No heart remains for people. Look at that Andalusian goat, Picasso. His biographers come for my stories of him, beg, offer money, but I tell them, “Go to the hell, I am not an human juke box. Composers? My father was one. Vyvyan Ayrs. His ears was burnt with his music. I, or my mother, he rarely listened. Formidable in his generation, but now he is fallen from the repertory. He exiled at Zedelghem, south of Bruges. My mother’s estate was there. My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many – lesses and – lessnesses. You think I am French?’

I nodded.

‘Belgian. The destiny of discreet neighbours is to be confused with the noisy ones next door. See an animal! On the lawn. By the geraniums…’

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