SUNDY MORNING IN THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Résumé : A middle-aged American, wary and on the rebound from a bruising affair, works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. To Austin's amused astonishment, life takes on the colour of romance. As they dash between Bohemian suppers and glittering salons, all they have to deal with are comic clashes of cultures, of ages, of temperaments. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon. Soon, with increasing desperation, their quest for health and happiness drives them to Rome, Venice, Key West, Montreal and Providence - landscapes soaked with feeling which lead, in the end, to the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara.

Extrait I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher's famous theoretical seminars. He was quoting Empedocles, in his plangent, airy voice. "Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads." He frequently quoted Empedocles, usually this passage. We were discussing, not for the first time, Lacan's theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body. There were twelve postgraduates, including myself, and Professor Ormerod Goode. It was a sunny day and the windows were very dirty. I was looking at the windows, and I thought, I’m not going to go on with this anymore. Just like that. It was May 8th 1994. I know that, because my mother had been buried the week before, and I'd missed the seminar on Frankenstein.I don't think my mother's death had anything to do with my decision, though as I set it down, I see it might be construed that way. It's odd that I can't remember what text we were supposed to be studying on that last day. We'd been doing a lot of not-too-long texts written by women. And also quite a lot of Freud—we'd deconstructed the Wolf Man, and Dora. The fact that I can't remember, though a little humiliating, is symptomatic of the “reasons” for my abrupt decision. All the seminars, in fact, had a fatal family likeness. They were repetitive in the extreme. We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying. I thought, next we will go on to the phantasmagoria of Bosch, and, in his incantatory way, Butcher obliged. I went on looking at the filthy window above his head, and I thought, I must have things. I know a dirty window is an ancient, well-worn trope for intellectual dissatisfaction and scholarly blindness. The thing is, that the thing was also there. A real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing.I was sitting next to Ormerod Goode. Ormerod Goode and Gareth Butcher were joint Heads of Department that year, and Goode, for reasons never made explicit, made it his business to be present at Butcher's seminars. This attention was not reciprocated, possibly because Goode was an Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Norse expert, specialising in place-names. Gareth Butcher did not like dead languages, and was not proficient in living ones. He read his Foucault and Lacan in translation, like his Heraclitus and his Empedocles. Ormerod Goode contributed little to the seminars, beyond corrections of factual inaccuracies, which he noticed even when he appeared to be asleep. No one cared much for these interventions. Inaccuracies can be subsumed as an inevitable part of postmodern uncertainty, or play, one or the other or both.I liked sitting next to Goode—most of the other students didn't—because he made inscrutable notes in ancient runes. Also he drew elaborate patterns of carved, interlaced plants and creatures—Celtic, Viking, I didn't know—occasionally improper or obscene, always intricate. I liked the runes because I have always liked codes and secret languages, and more simply, because I grew up on Tolkien. I suppose, if the truth were told, I should have to confess that I ended up as a postgraduate student of literature because of an infantile obsession with Gandalf's Middle Earth. I did like poetry too, and I did—in self-defence—always know Tolkien's poems weren't the real thing. I remember discovering T. S. Eliot. And then Donne and Marvell. Long ago and far away. I don't know, to this day, if Ormerod Goode loved or despised Tolkien. Tolkien's people are sexless and Goode's precisely shadowed graffiti were anything but. Plaisir, consommation, jouissance. Glee. He was—no doubt still is—a monumentally larger man. He has a round bald cranium, round gold glasses round round, darkly brown eyes, a round, soft mouth, several chins, a round belly carried comfortably on pillars of legs between columnar arms. I think of him, always, as orotund Ormerod Goode, adding more Os to his plethora, and a nice complex synaesthetic metaphor—an accurate one—to my idea of him. Anyway, there I was, next to him, when I made my decision, and when I took my eyes away from the dirty glass there was his BB pencil, hovering lazily, tracing a figleaf, a vine, a thigh, hair, fingers, round shiny fruit.I found myself walking away beside him, down the corridor, when it was over. I felt a need to confirm my decision by telling someone about it. He walked with a rapid sailing motion, lightly for such a big man. I had almost to run to keep up with him. I should perhaps say, now, that I am a very small man. "Small but perfectly formed" my father would say, several times a day, before his disappearance. He himself was not much bigger. The family name is Nanson; my full name is Phineas Gilbert Nanson—I sign myself always Phineas G. Nanson. When I discovered—in a Latin class when I was thirteen—that nanus was the Latin for dwarf, cognate with the French nain, I felt a frisson of excited recognition. I was a little person, the child of a little person, I had a name in a system, Nanson. I have never felt anything other than pleasure in my small, delicate frame. Its only disadvantage is the number of cushions I need to see over the dashboard when driving. I am adept and nimble on ladders. But keeping up with Ormerod Goode's lazy pace was a problem. I said, into his wake, "I have just made an important decision."He stopped. His moon-face considered mine, thoughtfully."I have decided to give it all up. I’ve decided I don’t want to be a postmodern literary theorist.""We should drink to that," said Ormerod Goode. "Come into my office."His office, like the rest of our run-down department, had dirty windows, and a dusty, no-coloured carpet. It also had two high green leather wing-chairs, a mahogany desk and a tray of spotless glasses which he must have washed himself. He produced a bottle of malt whisky from a bookcase. He poured us each a generous glass, and enquired what had led to this decision, and was it as sudden as it appeared. I replied that it had seemed sudden, at least had surprised me, but that it appeared to be quite firm. "You may be wise," said Ormerod Goode. "Since it was a bolt from the blue, I take it you have no ideas about what you will do with the open life that now lies before you?"I wondered whether to tell him about the dirty window. I said, "I felt an urgent need for a life full of things." I was pleased with the safe, solid Anglo-Saxon word. I had avoided the trap of talking about "reality" and "unreality" for I knew very well that postmodernist literary theory could be described as a reality. People lived in it. I did, however, fatally, add the Latin-derived word, less exact, redundant even, to my precise one. "I need a life full of things," I said. "Full of facts.""Facts," said Ormerod Goode. "Facts." He meditated. "The richness," he said, "the surprise, the shining solidity of a world full of facts. Every established fact—taking its place in a constellation of glittering facts like planets in an empty heaven, declaring here is matter, and there is vacancy—every established fact illuminates the world. True scholarship once aspired to add its modest light to that illumination. To clear a few cobwebs. No more."His round eyes glowed behind his round lenses. I found myself counting the Os in his pronouncements, as though they were coded clues to a new amplitude. The Glenmorangie slid like smooth flame down my throat. I said that a long time ago I had been in love with poetry, but that now I needed things, facts. "Verbum caro factum est," said Ormerod Goode opaquely. "The art of biography is a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts. By far the greatest work of scholarship in my time, to my knowledge, is Scholes Destry-Scholes’s biographical study of Sir Elmer Bole. But nobody knows it. It is not considered. And yet, the ingenuity, the passion."I remarked, perhaps brashly, that I had always considered biography a bastard form, a dilettante pursuit. Tales told by those incapable of true invention, simple stories for those incapable of true critical insight. Distractions constructed by amateurs for lady readers who would never grapple with The Waves or The Years but liked to feel they had an intimate acquaintance with the Woolfs and with Bloomsbury, from daring talk of semen on skirts to sordid sexual interference with nervous girls. A gossipy form, I said to Ormerod Goode, encouraged by Glenmorangie and nervous emptiness of spirit. There was some truth in that view, he conceded, rising smoothly from his wing-chair and strolling over to his bookcase. But I should consider, said Ormerod Goode, two things.Gossip, on the one hand, is an essential part of human communication, not to be ignored. And on the other, a great biography is a noble thing. Consider, he said, the fact that no human individual resembles another. We are not clones, we are not haplodiploid beings. From egg to eventual decay, each of us is unique. What can be nobler, he reiterated, or more exacting, than to explore, to constitute, to open, a whole man, a whole opus, to us? What resources—scientific, intellectual, psychological, historical, linguistic and geographic—does a man—or a woman—not need, who would hope to do justice to such a task? I know, I know, he said, that most biographies are arid or sugary parodies of what is wanted. And the true masterpiece—such as Destry-Scholes's magnum opus—is not always recognised when it is made, for biographical readers have taste corrupted ...

Extrait Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill.  It had all been said before, but they said it again."She never knew what hit her." "When she did it was too late." "Rapid onset." "Poor Molly." "Mmm."Poor Molly.  It began with a tingling in her arm as she raised it outside the Dorchester Grill to stop a cab--a sensation that never went away.  Within weeks she was fumbling for the names of things.  Parliament, chemistry, propeller she could forgive herself, but less so bed, cream, mirror.  It was after the temporary disappearance of acanthus and bresaiola that she sought medical advice, expecting reassurance.  Instead, she was sent for tests and, in a sense, never returned.  How quickly feisty Molly became the sickroom prisoner of her morose, possessive husband, George.  Molly, restaurant critic, gorgeous wit, and photographer, the daring gardener, who had been loved by the foreign secretary and could still turn a perfect cartwheel at the age of forty-six.  The speed of her descent into madness and pain became a matter of common gossip: the loss of control of bodily function and with it all sense of humor, and then the tailing off into vagueness interspersed with episodes of ineffectual violence and muffled shrieking.It was the sight now of George emerging from the chapel that caused Molly's lovers to move off farther up the weedy gravel path.  They wandered into an arrangement of oval rose beds marked by a sign, THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE.  Each plant had been savagely cut back to within a few inches of the frozen ground, a practice Molly used to deplore.  The patch of lawn was strewn with flattened cigarette butts, for this was a place where people came to stand about and wait for the funeral party ahead of theirs to clear the building.  As they strolled up and down, the two old friends resumed the conversation they had had in various forms a half-dozen times before but that gave them rather more comfort than singing "Pilgrim."Clive Linley had known Molly first, back when they were students in '68 and lived together in a chaotic, shifting household in the Vale of Health."A terrible way to go."He watched his own vaporized breath float off into the gray air.  The temperature in central London was said to be twelve degrees today.  Twelve.  There was something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor his absence could be blamed.  Man's first disobedience, the Fall, a falling figure, an oboe, nine notes, ten notes.  Clive had the gift of perfect pitch and heard them descending from the G.  There was no need to write them down.He continued, "I mean, to die that way, with no awareness, like an animal.  To be reduced, humiliated, before she could make arrangements, or even say goodbye.  It crept up on her, and then .  .  ."He shrugged.  They came to the end of the trampled lawn, turned, and walked back."She would have killed herself rather than end up like that," Vernon Halliday said.  He had lived with her for a year in Paris in '74, when he had his first job with Reuters and Molly did something or other for Vogue."Brain-dead and in George's clutches," Clive said.George, the sad, rich publisher who doted on her and whom, to everyone's surprise, she had not left, though she always treated him badly.  They looked now to where he stood outside the door, receiving commiseration from a group of mourners.  Her death had raised him from general contempt.  He appeared to have grown an inch or two, his back had straightened, his voice had deepened, a new dignity had narrowed his pleading, greedy eyes.  Refusing to consign her to a home, he had cared for her with his own hands.  More to the point, in the early days, when people still wanted to see her, he vetted her visitors.  Clive and Vernon were strictly rationed because they were considered to make her excitable and, afterward, depressed about her condition.  Another key male, the foreign secretary, was also unwelcome.  People began to mutter; there were muted references in a couple of gossip columns.  And then it no longer mattered, because the word was she was horribly not herself; people didn't want to go and see her and were glad that George was there to prevent them.  Clive and Vernon, however, continued to enjoy loathing him.As they turned about again, the phone in Vernon's pocket rang.  He excused himself and stepped aside, leaving his friend to proceed alone.  Clive drew his overcoat about him and slowed his pace.  There must be over two hundred in the black-suited crowd outside the crematorium now.  Soon it would seem rude not to go over and say something to George.  He got her finally, when she couldn't recognize her own face in the mirror.  He could do nothing about her affairs, but in the end she was entirely his.  Clive was losing the sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten-note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image.  Her face in it.  The end.  All he wanted now was the warmth, the silence of his studio, the piano, the unfinished score, and to reach the end.  He heard Vernon say in parting, "Fine.  Rewrite the standfirst and run it on page four.  I'll be there in a couple of hours." Then he said to Clive, "Bloody Israelis.  We ought to wander over.""I suppose so."But instead they took another turn about the lawn, for they were there, after all, to bury Molly.With a visible effort of concentration, Vernon resisted the anxieties of his office.  "She was a lovely girl.  Remember the snooker table?"In 1978 a group of friends rented a large house in Scotland for Christmas.  Molly and the man she was going about with at the time, a QC named Brady, staged an Adam and Eve tableau on a disused snooker table, he in his Y-fronts, she in bra and panties, a cue rest for a snake and a red ball for an apple.  The story handed down, however, the one that had appeared in an obituary and was remembered that way even by some who were present, was that Molly "danced naked on Christmas Eve on a snooker table in a Scottish castle.""A lovely girl," Clive repeated.She had looked right at him when she pretended to bite the apple, and smiled raunchily through her chomping, with one hand on a jutting hip, like a music hall parody of a tart.  He thought it was a signal, the way she held his gaze, and sure enough, they were back together that April.  She moved into the studio in South Kensington and stayed through the summer.  This was about the time her restaurant column was taking off, when she went on television to denounce the Michelin guide as the "kitsch of cuisine." It was also the time of his own first break, the Orchestral Variations at the Festival Hall.  Second time round.  She probably hadn't changed, but he had.  Ten years on, he'd learned enough to let her teach him something.  He'd always been of the hammer-and-tongs school.  She taught him sexual stealth, the occasional necessity of stillness.  Lie still, like this, look at me, really look at me.  We're a time bomb.  He was almost thirty, by today's standards a late developer.  When she found a place of her own and packed her bags, he asked her to marry him.  She kissed him, and quoted in his ear, He married a woman to stop her getting away/Now she's there all day.  She was right, for when she went he was happier than ever to be alone and wrote the Three Autumn Songs in less than a month."Did you ever learn anything from her?" Clive asked suddenly.In the mid-eighties Vernon too had had a second bite, on holiday on an estate in Umbria.  Then he was Rome correspondent for the paper he now edited, and a married man."I can never remember sex," he said after a pause."I'm sure it was brilliant.  But I do remember her teaching me all about porcini, picking them, cooking them."Clive assumed this was an evasion and decided against any confidences of his own.  He looked toward the chapel entrance.  They would have to go across.  He surprised himself by saying rather savagely, "You know, I should have married her.  When she started to go under, I would have killed her with a pillow or something and saved her from everyone's pity."Vernon was laughing as he steered his friend away from the Garden of Remembrance.  "Easily said.  I can just see you writing exercise yard anthems for the cons, like what's-her-name, the suffragette.""Ethel Smyth.  I'd do a damn better job than she did."The friends of Molly who made up the funeral gathering would have preferred not to be at a crematorium, but George had made it clear there was to be no memorial service.  He didn't want to hear these three former lovers publicly comparing notes from the pulpits of St.  Martin's or St.  James's, or exchanging glances while he made his own speech.  As Clive and Vernon approached they heard the familiar gabble of a cockt... --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Broché .