The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels by De Vries Peter

Author:De Vries, Peter [De Vries, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497669727
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Fortunately he could throw himself into his work, which steadily advanced his study of human folly. When Raymond was not along, traipsing without trouble in his wake, he was an ideal companion to come home to, after a day of selling tins of fresh air. The table would be set, ready for the steak Tattersall would broil outside or the beef Stroganoff he would cook inside. The boy was eleven or twelve, but like his kind could easily have been confused with twenty or thirty. He could get the table ready and clear it, he could be trusted to turn the stove off and on, and would fetch what you pointed to, gargling unintelligibly as he waddled over with it. It suited Tattersall’s purpose at this juncture to treat him as an equal.

“Joyce used to say that the only true colors are to be found in a grocery store,” he chatted as he unpacked the day’s shopping. “And he was right. Look at that orange, that peach, those string beans. They quite undermine the assumption that there are three primary colors, don’t you think? There are dozens! Fruit and vegetables I find more exhilarating than flowers, for color. More genuinely satisfying.”

The idiot washed the provisions at the sink, making mouths and chewing his tongue as he worked, occasionally giving out some guttural, gurgling noise which Tattersall would take up and develop.

“Yes, I quite agree. The present status of Joyce is rather a mixed one. The farther you get into his epic works the more, it seems to me, the more you’re confronted with something to be admired rather than enjoyed. You remember Mary Colum’s remark after his famous Paris reading from Finnegans Wake. ‘It’s outside literature,’ she told Joyce, shaking in her shoes though she was. Incidentally, Hemingway was in that audience. It would be interesting to know what he said, if anything. Well, as I was saying, I enjoy Finnegans Wake less than I do Ulyssess, Ulysses less than the Portrait. So there you have it. I’m not a true Joycean any more than I am a true Jamesian, I fear. I prefer his early novels to the Late Great Phase. All that upholstery! And in all those miles of criticism, I don’t think there’s a line that sums James up better than his aunt’s remark. That he chewed more than he bit off.”

The vegetables went into a casserole called Chicken Haute Loire, which Tattersall baked in a bedpan. He had found one in an upstairs cabinet, never so far put to any purpose, judging from the label he had had to scrape off before sterilizing it in the dishwasher, and it struck him as ideal for culinary purposes, certainly a waste not to use, especially as there was no casserole among the jumble of pots and pans under the kitchen sink. The dish simmered succulently in its juices, and in the white wine later added. With it, he drank the rest of the bottle, a Corton Charlemagne of an unimpeachable year.

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