A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston

Author:Wayne Johnston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literary, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307399892
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Landish confined himself to his room on Sunday afternoons to work on his book. He otherwise worked on it when, as he told the Blokes, “idleness and inspiration coincide,” but he spent Sunday afternoons writing it whether he felt like it or not. He told them: “First you become an anecdotalist. Only a raconteur can certify an anecdotalist. And only a scribe can certify a raconteur. When you’re allowed to write things down, you become a scribe. Then you have to choose between fiction and non-fiction. A fork in the road. Two roads that look a lot alike. But either way you’re called a scribe. A scribe of fiction, first class, is not allowed to write a story, but can oversee the writing of a scene, with or without dialogue, or even a character sketch. And then you rise up through the ranks until you get your first commission and are put in charge of writing an entire work, in my case one of fiction.”

Van had given him a typewriter to celebrate the three-month anniversary of their arrival at Vanderland and appointed his secretary, a Mr. Smythe, to give him rudimentary lessons in the use of the machine. That, combined with solitary practice, had resulted in his developing a technique involving only his thumbs and index fingers. His fingers were so large that he frequently struck two or more keys at once, but he had come to prefer the clatter of the typewriter to the near-silent scratching of pen on paper. The typewriter, a cast-iron Remington that, being completely unenclosed, caused Gough to describe it as being “all innards,” looked like the overturned skeleton of some skinny, many-boned animal with a single rack of forty ribs.

The weather brightened through the early summer. When it was nice, the others, Deacon included, would go outside and leave The Blokes to him, but when it was wet or cold, they had no choice but to put up with the din that he made. Deacon stuck his fingers in his ears and tried to concentrate on reading. The Blokes strained to hear the gramophone. Gough told Landish that it sounded as if he was not so much using the typewriter as trying to subdue it, as if the main task of his life was not to compose a book but to exact, by means of bludgeoning it, an admission of defeat from a small creature that he kept hidden in his room. His fingers pounded the keys like hammerheads, the typewriter jumped about and thudded on his desk, which in turn knocked against the wall, while his feet kept a kind of time with his fingers, stamping on the floor with such force that the adjoining rooms shook as much as his did. The tumult went on almost ceaselessly, with pauses just long enough to suggest that he might be done for the day, and then it would resume, seemingly louder than before, as if he had asked the thing that he was doing

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