Lilacs

Lilacs (1900) is one of my favourite works by the Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel - although I’d have to add that I only know this artist’s paintings from images in books, and on-line. His famous works are held by Russian and Ukrainian museums, and I have never visited either country: Lilacs is in the Tretyakov Gallery, in Moscow.

  

The book from which I scanned the images above is a Soviet-era publication (compiled by one S. Kaplanova, and issued by Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad) with texts in English, French, German and Russian. I noted with interest that the Russian for ‘lilacs’ is, if my exceedingly shaky grasp of the Cyrillic alphabet did not mislead me, something like ‘sireny’. I wondered then whether the figure in the painting might be a siren of some kind, and her presence on the canvas due to a straighforward play on words. Having said that, her gesture seems more one of farewell, than a beckoning one. The accompanying text in the book, while poetic, offers no further clue:

The cool, fragrant clusters of lilac blossoms set off the woman’s pale face, wistful and enigmatic. A cold violet light emanates from the blossoms, spectrally luminous in the darkness of the night. Their beauty is the beauty of life…

lilac Obs. Fr. (now lilas ult. f. Pers. līlak (whence also Turk. leylâk) var. of nīlak bluish, f. nīl blue + dim. suff. -ak - SOED.

Common lilac is a native of the northern Balkan Peninsula. Around 1560, the German ambassador in Constantinople sent off specimens to Vienna, and the culture quickly spread to the rest of Europe […] Etymology: Gr. syrinx, tube or flute, because of the hollow, marrow-filled branches; Lat. vulgaris, common. Like jasmine, lilac belongs to the olive family - source here.

The lilacs in the parks and gardens in the town where we live are now all in full bloom, and the night air is rich with their fragrance. I took a few photographs of the lilacs in the park near our apartment the other evening: the images above are small snippets cut from these.

Gillray, Continued

In his biography of Gillray, Draper Hill writes ‘According to the natural order of things, a satiric temperament seems to impel its possessor to the left, towards a philosophy of social justice - in Gillray’s case, this development was partially blocked by the Reign of Terror [in post-revolutionary France], which stifled any visible Republican leanings and obliged him to join in a defence of the status quo’. The situation in France had not preoccupied Gillray until the Revolution entered its radical phase in the autumn of 1792: the Jacobin regime and its successors aroused a deeply-felt antipathy in the caricaturist, one that provoked some of his bluntest and harshest satires. The growing hostility between Britain and France, and the attendant ‘threat to national security’ meanwhile awakened Gillray’s latent sense of patriotism. These factors partly explain a shift in the tenor of Gillray’s output toward the political right in the mid-1790s.

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A good many of the designs in Gillray’s prints were executed after requests and suggestions from amateur satirists, gentlemen who would pay to see their wit given the Gillray treatment. One such, who became friendly with Gillray, was the Rev. John Sneyd, M.A., Rector of Elford (near Lichfield). Sneyd was also a close friend of George Canning, an ambitious young Tory politician. Canning shared Sneyd’s taste for caricature, and his talent for satire. He was also keenly aware of the value of publicity, and tried to use his indirect connexion with Gillray to get himself featured in one of the caricaturist’s prints: which by that time was a sure sign of having ‘arrived’ politically. Gillray was reluctant to do this at first, perhaps sensing little satiric capital in the political newcomer, but, some months after Canning had gained office as an undersecretary in the Foreign Office (early in 1796), his face began to show up in a few of Gillray’s prints.

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In the course of their overtures to Gillray in 1795 and ’96, Sneyd and Canning had gradually succeeded in gaining both Gillray’s attention, and his respect. Canning, and those in his circle, came to exert a distinct influence on the content of Gillray’s satires. In 1797, Canning secretly helped set up a stridently reactionary weekly journal entitled The Anti-Jacobin. One of the Anti-Jacobin’s chief contributors was an old schoolmate of Canning’s called John Hookham Frere. Frere roped in Sneyd to ask Gillray to put out prints that would complement the screeds in the journal. Gillray obliged, although there were occasions when the unrestrained malice of his unsubtle contributions backfired on the Anti-Jacobin’s backers. By the end of ‘97, Canning’s influence over Gillray had solidified into financial form, in the shape of a regular pension… ‘From this time forward, Gillray shows a considerable gain in political awareness, particularly as regards foreign affairs. Attacks on royalty, which had been declining in number and vehemence, were now discontinued.’

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By the end of the 1790s, Gillray had long since ceased to view his work with cynical or mercenary ambivalence. Instead, he had come to look upon his political satires as a kind of public service, and justified them as a patriot’s duty. When, in 1800, his integrity was called into question during a protracted financial and legal dispute over an abortive commission to supply a portfolio of prints to accompany a planned follow-up to the Anti-Jacobin, Gillray seems to have been genuinely distraught that an opportunity ‘to serve a Cause which I thought myself honor’d in suffering every disadvantage for’ had come to nothing. He complained that to have had his motives impugned in the matter ‘hurt me beyond anything I have met with, during a Life made up of hardships & disappintments.’

Four of the present images deal directly or indirectly with ‘The French Question’. The first contrasts a starving but contented French peasant with a well-fed but grumbling English yokel. The fifth image portrays an ailing Britannia incompetently attended by her politicians while still menaced by the spectre of Napoleon. Of all Gillray’s caricatures, he is perhaps best-remembered for those featuring Napoleon, oftenest personified as ‘Little Boney’. In the sixth image we see a Gulliver-sized Boney in his boat being blown toward a Brobdingnagian King George. The seventh image, above, is one of Gillray’s most famous, depicting Pitt and Napoleon carving off portions of the globe.

A substantial proportion of Gillray’s caricatures were not political at all, but instead poked fun at the vagaries of fashion, and at the social mores and the principal personalities of his day. Gillray had a keen sense of what made people laugh, ‘despite the fact that his humour is not particularly remarkable for its warmth, or charity.’ A rare exception is the second image above, which portrays a convivial game of whist at Mrs Humphreys’: Mrs H. is the lady in the bonnet behind the table. The third image is a caustic, but beautifully-executed portrayal of a lady of fashion, who, evidently following the letter rather than the spirit of the then-modish doctrines of Rousseau, sees it as the ‘natural’ thing to breastfeed her own child. The fourth and eighth images are unkind character-studies of two men-about-town: James Duff, the Earl of Fife, and the Marquis of Stafford (a noted patron of the Arts), respectively.

There are few accounts of Gillray’s personality, and those few often contradict each other, but, there is good evidence to suggest that he suffered from bouts of depression, and maudlin hypochondria. In his book, Draper Hill plausibly suggests that Gillray had a deep-seated and morbid fear of losing his sight, and that, when his sight indeed began to fail, after 1806, that this paved the way for the breakdown that followed in 1809. Gillray lived on for another six years, more or less insane, in the care of Mrs Humphrey. He died, possibly from suicide (there are contradictory accounts of his death), in 1815. One of his last known drawings is shown above, its title: Pray Pity the Sorrows of a Poor, Blind Man.

My sources for the quotations and images above are the same as in the previous entry: see below. Click on the images to see them enlarged.

Gillray

James Gillray (1756-1815) was one of the first professional caricaturists, an artist whose command of satire and master-draughtsmanship helped found the tradition of the political cartoon. Gillray learned his trade as an engraver’s apprentice, and later as a student of engraving at the Royal Academy, then under the presidency of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Incidentally, Gillray’s attendance at the academy overlapped with that of William Blake. Gillray began selling his first caricatures while still a student: ‘At first the most noteworthy were concerned with the brothel and the privy, but politics gradually began to intrude.’ To begin with, it seems that Gillray considered his caricatures to be an interim money-earner, while he pursued more serious artistic goals. During the 1780s, he worked for a number of publishers, and accepted commissions from all-comers, attacking Whigs and Tories alike with equal venom.

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After a series of disappointing encounters with the artistic establishment, Gillray eventually came to realise that caricature was his vocation, and this shows in a more meticulous quality seen in work from the early 1790s onward, and in the fact that he began to sign his more important plates J^s. G^y. This change coincided with the beginning of Gillray’s exclusive affiliation with the publisher and print-shop proprietess Hannah Humphrey, ‘a maiden lady who preferred to be known as Mrs. Humphrey, she was some years older than the caricaturist, although her debut as a professional print-seller coincides with their [first] association [in 1779].’

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A large proportion of Gillray’s satires in the early 1790s were directed at the Royal Family. Even though some of these were of an unprecedented savagery, and on occasion caused genuine offence, they were more or less tolerated (and sometimes even admired) at court. A contemporary account notes that George III collected caricatures which were about himself, and viewed them with patient good-will, but that the Prince of Wales (later George IV) was less tolerant. Even so, an account was maintained on the Prince’s behalf at Mrs. Humphrey’s shop from 1803 onward.

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The intemperate Prince is portrayed in three of the present images. The second and fifth of the prints shown here deal with his clandestine (and invalid) marriage to his mistress Mrs Fitzherbert, a widow, and a Roman Catholic, in 1785. The latter print consciously echoes Hogarth’s famous Marriage à la Mode. The seventh print (below) is a needle-sharp satire on the Prince’s dissolute lifestyle which bears the marvellous title A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion. We see the King lampooned in the fourth and eighth prints, for his devotion to the music of Händel, and for his supposed parsimoniousness, respectively. The sixth print (above) targets Frederick, the Duke of York, who was married in 1791 to Frederica, eldest daughter to the King of Prussia. The sycophantic press had apparently been effusive on the subject of the none-too-attractive Duchess’s tiny feet and exquisite shoes…

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Concerning the two prints above with non-Royal subjects, the first has statesman and man of letters Edmund Burke as its subject, and the third derides the supposedly lax and immoral behaviour of the British in India. All of the present images were scanned from the catalogue of a 2001 Tate exhibition of Gillray’s work: James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, while Draper Hill’s 1965 biography Mr. Gillray, the Caricaturist was my source for most of the foregoing quotations. Click on the images to see them enlarged. To be continued…

Bletted Medlars

I recently acquired and read a copy of Robert Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters. As Aickman is a relatively obscure author, and this perhaps his obscurest book, it proved quite difficult to obtain, and I ended up paying a high price for an unassuming age-spotted hardback in a typically garish yellow Gollancz dustjacket. But it was all worthwhile, as I do so enjoy the distinctive flavour of Aickman’s prose, redolent, to me, of a particular essence of Englishness: one that evokes heavy, cumbersome furniture, awkward encounters, and stodgy food; all related with fogeyish deliberation, yet that is meanwhile suffused with an air of completely baffling strangeness. One can rely on Aickamn’s backward-looking vocabulary to turn up an occasional odd or obsolete turn of phrase, and in this respect, The Late Breakfasters was no exception, the most obvious example being the bletted medlars.

The trouble was that no one seemed to want medlars: no one except perhaps Mrs. Hatch, and even she, like most people in such cases, seemed more concerned that the others should like medlars than happy that she liked them herself. She implied, with the faintest undertone of pugnacity, that these particular medlars had been preserved in eaxctly the recommended state of decomposition since the previous autumn, an undertaking involving much skill and difficulty, of which the present company were privileged to enjoy the benefit.
   To begin with, the Duke and Duchess did not know what medlars were, and fogged themselves worse and worse with obscure Germanic polysyllables, cooing together like puzzled budgerigars. Then Edwin seemed afraid that the deliquescent fibres would damage his suit. And Griselda had experienced medlars in the past.
   Pamela merely said “They look rotten.”
   The Duke, speaking German, made some reference to their smell.
   “Not rotten at all,” said Mrs. Hatch. “The fruit is in the finest possible condition for eating. It is properly bletted.”
   “What is bletted, Melanie?” asked the Duchess.
   “Medlars cannot be eaten, Odile, until they mature. Then they are the most delicious of all fruit. Try one and see for yourself.”

I had vaguely heard of medlars before, but could bring nothing specific to mind, and had certainly never knowingly eaten one. I wondered exactly what bletting involved, and was surprised to find that the SOED contained no entry for the word. Fortunately, the inexhaustable internet offered up some specifics:

Parkinson in 1627 spoke “of the pleasant sweetness of the fruit when mellow.” But today they are nowhere available in shops or markets and impossible to find except in a few private gardens. This should change. […] The unique dark green brown fruit […] is picked after a hard frost. The flesh is then still hard, green and austere and must be kept on a dry cool shelf until the pulp softens and mellows when it turns a light brown. This process is known as “bletting.” The pulp has then a distinctive pleasantly acidulous flavor - source here.

Medlars have been cultivated since ancient times for their edible fruit which, as Alfred Rehder so delicately describes, “after incipient decay becomes soft and of agreeable acid taste.” This after-ripening, known as bletting, is similar to the ripening process of American persimmon. Bletted fruit has flesh with the consistency and taste of apple butter. - source here.

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet, II, 1.

This page was my source for the photograph above. The manuscript illumination (painted by Joris Hoefnagel) is one that, I just realised, I have posted before… Click on the images to see them enlarged.

The Suit of Books

In Nuremburg, in 1588, an illustrator by the name of Jost Amman issued a book called Charta lusoria, containing a complete set of designs for a non-standard deck of playing-cards. Although there are fifty-two cards in this set, divided in the usual way into four suits, the suits themselves are not the usual ones, but rather Ink-pads, Books, Drinking-cups and Pots. Amman’s book is another of the fascinating volumes presented by the Herzog August Library (which I’ve previously mentioned here & here), and it is from their site that I lifted the following images of the Suit of Books:

I don’t know whether these cards were even primarily intended for recreational use: the fact that, in the body of the book, only every fourth page was printed, does suggest that the cards were meant to be cut out, or at least used as templates, and played with. On the other hand, each card was printed with a motto in Latin and German, in the manner of an emblem-book, so perhaps the card-deck format was more a way of structuring the morals contained in these texts.

Jost Amman is one of the most prolific illustrators of the 16th century. Born in Zurich in 1539, he was the son of a teacher of a local renowned college, but preferred to follow his artistic inclination rather than becoming a scholar himself. His apprenticeship was carried out partly in Switzerland and, probably, in France too, as suggested by his early designs. In 1562 he settled in Nuremberg, where he worked for publisher L.Heussler. His works include portraits, illustrations for books on various themes, ornamental designs, stained glass windows, jewelry, [etc…] Despite his name gradually became well-known, he never made a fortune, and in his late years he actually lived in poverty. He died in Nuremberg in 1591, only three years after having finished this deck.

Although [the deck’s] composition matches non-German patterns (i.e. Italian, Spanish, French), we may still include these cards among the German-structured decks […] In first place, the three courts are typically German: a lower knave (Unter Knabe), an upper one (Ober Knabe) and a king, as still found in decks for playing Skat, Jass, etc. […] In second place, the 10s of each suit do not feature the relevant number of pips, as the other nine cards do, but show a woman wearing rich clothes […] with a small flag in the corner, featuring the roman numeral X [… Thirdly,] two aces of this deck feature a large crest, one of which vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a heart […]: this is a further detail found among the contemporary German-suited Swiss cards.

Click on the images to see them enlarged. To see the cards in context, try the following links: A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, LK, UK, K. The italicised text above is taken from this page at Andy Pollett’s very informative playing-cards site.

A Fourth Spring

For a May day, it is untypically drab and chilly here today. May is my favourite time of year in these parts, and is usually so full of warm sunshine, fragrant breezes and refreshing rainshowers, all of which were in glorious evidence this past weekend, just not today. This is our fourth spring season in Scandinavia…

The image above is another of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s ‘composed heads’, this time Spring, from one of several series of paintings illustrating the Four Seasons that he executed during the 1560s and ’70s. The original Seasons were painted ca. 1563, for the Hapsburg emperor Maximilian, to whom they were formally presented in 1569. Of that set, only Summer and Winter, both currently in Vienna, are known to have survived. The painting above is from a set which found its way to Spain, possibly as a gift from the German Hapsburgs to their Spanish cousins. The next Spring, below, painted in 1572, may have been one of the spoils of the sack of Prague by a force of Swedish mercenaries in 1648. In any case, it was held in Swedish collections until this set’s sale, in 1965.

The third Spring, below, with the floral frame, is from a series dated 1573, and is thought to have been part of another Hapsburg gift-set, which resides today in the Louvre. A very similar Spring, not illustrated here, belonged to a quartet of seasons that came into the possession of Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, the ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia, and which has remained in a family collection ever since.

Lastly, and in place of a fourth Spring, there is Arcimboldo’s similarly flowery Flora, or rather a version of a painting by that name, one of Arcimboldo’s last, dating from 1591, which is now thought lost. The authenticity of this version is apparently open to some doubt.

Click on the images to see them greatly enlarged. My source for the present images, and for most of the information above, is the 1980 FMR monograph about Arcimboldo, hence some of the locations and attributions mentioned above may now be wrong.

More ‘Natural Curiosities’

In a previous entry I mentioned Albertus Seba’s ‘Cabinet of Natural Curiosities’, and my none-too-satisfactory efforts to present some images taken from it. This morning, I tried again, this time using the super-macro setting on my digital camera. This, in combination with some basic photoshopping, yielded slightly better results…

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The present images are all details taken from the first volume of Seba’s ‘Thesaurus’, which is variously concerned with illustrating plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds. Above are a two-toed tree-sloth with a small section of a common viper visible to its upper right, and a slender loris with the head of a snake said by Seba to be from Ceylon. Below are a gray four-eyed opossum, again with a small part of a snake (this time a common boa) caught in the frame, and a southern common opossum enjoying what looks like a pear.

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Another slender loris pokes its tongue out at us below, as does a chameleon. Below them are a crocodile, and a ‘hydra’. Whilst initially sceptical about the latter beast, Seba came to believe the hydra, purportedly owned by a pair of Hamburg merchants, was ‘definitely not the work of art, but that of Nature.’

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The hydra is of a bay colour, which seems to have an ash-grey shading. The back is uneven and bumpy, and one can see on each side six thick welts, oblong and hard as horn, under which are set seven other tubercules of the same nature but round… There is not a single scale on the skin of the main trunk, nor on the seven heads, but it has a marbled colour approaching chestnut. The seven heads are banded in the front section, like transverse rings. All the seven mouths are open equally wide and lined with lion’s teeth. The long tail is completely covered in rhomboid scales. Each foot terminates in toes that are armed with long, sharp claws.

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Click on the images to see them enlarged.

Free Books, Round Five

It’s time for the fifth of my occasional free book giveaways. The usual rigmarole applies: I present ten books, below, and, if you want one of them, you leave a comment stating which of them it is you’d like, and send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. I decide who gets what - usually it’s first-come, first-served, and is restricted to one book per recipient - and will despatch the books to their new owners within a week or so. I’ll pay all postage costs.

1. Salamander by Thomas Wharton. I picked this one up in Malmö, back in December, but didn’t get around to reading it until last month. It’s a sort of a Borges-lite meets Umberto Eco type book, in which a 17th-Century English printer is summoned to an eccentric general’s Mitteleuropean castle where he is charged with creating an infinite book. Most of it is well-written and imaginative, but the tale just doesn’t quite come together as a resonant whole. My copy is of the UK paperback edition published by Flamingo in 2003; 384pp; ISBN: 0007128665.

2. Moscow Stations by Venedikt Erofeev, translated from the Russian by Stephen Mulrine. This is a short novel tracing its incorrigably alcoholic narrator’s progress along a 2-hour train journey from Moscow to a nearby town. What begins as a rambling apology for its narrator’s, and, by extension, its author’s alcoholism, deepens towards the end of the book, and towards the end of the line, into a genuinely shocking tragedy. My copy is a 141pp paperback published by Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571192041.

3. ABZ: More Alphabets and Other Signs, compiled and edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding. This is a beautiful book which ‘presents, in full colour, a wealth of complete alphabets, emblems and logos, with stunning graphics from avant-garde modernist publications of the early 20th century’, but which, having said all that, is something, having glanced through a couple of times, I’m unlikely to pick up again. It’s a 224pp paperback, lovingly published by the excellent Redstone Press; ISBN: 1870003330.

4. The House of the Hidden Light by A.E. Waite and Arthur Machen, edited with an introduction by R.A. Gilbert. This curiosity is a record of a correspondence between the two authors dating from the first years of the last centuey. The letters are couched in such obscure and allusive language that some commentators have taken it as a manual issued in connection with the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which both authors were members. In fact, we learn, they are more likely just a disguised account of the pair’s social life. I must admit I found little of interest in this book, even as a staunch admirer of Machen’s prose. The book was originally published in an edition of 3 copies, and was reprinted for the first time last year, by the Tartarus Press, in a much larger run of 350, of which mine is one. ISBN: 1872621775.

5. Homo Zapiens aka Babylon by Victor Pelevin, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. From a publisher’s blurb: ‘When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera…’. Not my favourite Pelevin novel, but still very much worth reading. This is a UK paperback edition, 256pp; ISBN: 0142001813.

6. Gathering Evidence, a Memoir, by Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by David McLintock. I’ve read (and enjoyed) a couple of Bernhard’s novels, but couldn’t get into this book, which comprises five autobiographical texts by the grumpy Austrian. This is the UK paperback edition, published by Vintage; 352pp; ISBN: 0099442531.

7. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. I generally prefer Murakami’s more recent stuff, but then again, I’ve never failed to enjoy one of his books, and this exuberantly fantastic novel is still very good reading. It’s a 416pp UK paperback under the Harvill Panther imprint; ISBN: 1860469051.

8. All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland. It’ts been years since I last read anything of Coupland’s, but I quite enjoyed this slice of family life, even though I thought the psychoses were laid on a little too thick, here and there. My copy is a UK paperback edition; 288 pp, published by Flamingo; ISBN: 0007151705.

9. Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel, with contributions by Olaf Breidbach, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Richard Hartmann. I ordered this album of intricate illustrations by the 19th-Century natural scientist after seeing them on-line and then writing about them here. As with book no. 3, above, this is a beautifully-presented book, but one that I’m highly unlikely to revisit. It’s a paperback; 144 pp, published by Prestel; ISBN: 3791319906.

10. The Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones. This is yet another compendium of images that I bought, thinking I might use it as a visual reference, but which I have largely ignored. It is ‘the Victorian masterpiece on Oriental, Primitive, Classical, Mediaeval and Renaissance Design and Decorative Art’. I wrote about the book here. My copy is a hefty 380pp hardcover from a 1986 reprint edition published by Omega Books; ISBN: 1850070725.

Mayday in Munich

Seven years and a day ago I boarded a train at Roma Termini station in a pinched, stressed-out state of mind, having worked a full day and having then been unable to get any cash because the interbank link back to the UK was broken and I had no money in my Italian account. I had, moreover, been unable to reserve a cuccetta, that is, a bunk, and was obliged to make do with a regular seat in a cramped compartment in last class. The compartment was full and it wasn’t long before I felt quite uncomfortable as we headed north through Firenze onward slowly to Bolzano and the Alps.

I was on the train because I couldn’t afford to fly, and because I hated my job and Mr B________ had fixed me up with an interview in Munich at the main German offices of the company whose Swedish affiliate employs me today. The interview had been scheduled for May 1st, a national holiday in both Italy and Germany, thus, I thought, I would be able to steal away undetected without arousing my Italian employers’ suspicions.

It was a 12-hour overnight trip, but there was no way I could sleep in my seat, though two or three in my compartment were snoring peacefully all the same. By the time we arrived at München Hauptbahnhof I felt haggard and stale. I walked aimlessly awhile wondering how I might telephone Herr Marx, so that he could let me in to the locked and otherwise deserted offices where the interview was to be held. I had no phone and no Deutschmarks, nor, it seemed, could I withdraw any cash. Fortunately I found a payphone that accepted my credit card, made the call, and and alerted him of my imminent arrival.

Herr Marx (his real surname) could have been then-president Bill Clinton’s long-lost identical twin brother, so striking was the resemblance. The interview went relatively well, and if I came across as exhausted or bewildered, he was kind enough not to mention it. At least I didn’t answer anything with ‘Jawohl, Herr Mr President, sir…’ He seemed more concerned with my complete ignorance of the German language. I would need to start learning it if I were to get the job, he said. Interview done, I had ten hours to kill before my homeward train was to depart.

I walked through the city, looking in shop-windows, admiring the splendid Rathaus, stopping to change the 20,000 lire note I’d found, with great relief, tucked away in a pocket of my suit. This was enough to buy some chop suey from a stall in a crowded mayday market set up in a park or garden of some kind near the centre of town, in which I was more than once nudged or clunked by passing old-ladies brandishing walking-sticks like weapons, whom I could almost hear thinking take zat! and get aut of my vay!, and to admit me to the Alte Pinakothek art gallery, whose airconditioned rooms I explored in an outright stupor of wonderment at the quality and variety of works on display, even though now, when I try to bring them to mind I cannot clearly recall what pieces I saw. The present images would, I gather, have been among them.

After about thirty-six hours without sleep, I begin to go a little mad. I hallucinate, catching fleeting glimpses of misty somethings from the corner of my eye, and I become obtrusively paranoid, and imagine that I am being stared at, or talked about. As I sat slumped at a station café table, palely exhausted, dehydrated and somewhat deranged, I imagined hearing snatches of English conversation and whispered namecalling from the passers-by…

Luckily, on the return trip my only companions in the campartment were a quiet young couple, so there was room enough for the three of us to stretch out and get some sleep. Another full night awake would have left me in a terrible state. At one point in the Alpine darkness I imagined I heared the couple having almost-silent sex right beside me… in case I heared right, I lay still, feigning sleep and leaving them to it.

I was back at work before 10 the next morning, having showered and shaved and downed coffee, but I was there in skin & bone only, so very tired, and got nothing done. I never did hear back from Herr Marx, but about two months later, when I had at last decided to quit my job that I hated, and had lined up a series of interviews in the UK, I received a call from a colleague of his in Vienna saying ‘You start with us here on Monday, yes?’ ‘Uhhh, as it happens, no, I do not’, I replied.