Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

bellowed at a banker in Shanghai, I was entranced as a flotilla of model dreadnoughts came cruising by, line abreast; then appalled, when one of these six-foot Edwardian warships was opened from within, the entire deck and superstructure flipping up to reveal the pasty face of the middle-aged boy who was lying inside.
    I thought often of Claude Lévi-Strauss, still alive and buzzing at a hundred, an anthropological bee deep in the honeyed hiveof the Sorbonne. It was his contention – made with reference to Clouet’s portrait of Elizabeth of Austria – that all miniatures have an intrinsic aesthetic quality derivable from their very dimensions. So it was that Sherman and I set out for Godshill, a model village on the Isle of Wight, where we discovered a model of the model village inside of it, and inside this model, model village a third.
    Not that we neglected the sublime; after all, Sherman’s own works were themselves Burke’s ‘great objects and terrible’, willed concretizations that forced us into submission – albeit democratically. So we visited Northern Ireland for the weekend, and Baltie drove us in a rental Range Rover back and forth along the lanes to the south-west of Belfast, until we were able to establish the exact location from which Swift had seen the Divis and the Black Mountain massif as a recumbent giant, the easternmost tumulus of Cave Hill being its nose.
    I had also proposed a longer trip to the remote Shetland island of Foula, although, given the lack of network coverage, I very much doubted Sherman would agree to go. On Foula we could see thousand-foot sea cliffs, vaulting stone arches, plunging rocky gullies – and all of this natural giganticism crammed into nine square miles. It was the ultimate fantasia on the sublime themes of the very big and the very little.
    Not that either of us mentioned the B or the L word. It may have been all right for Sherman to say in public that he was a very small man who made very big things, but that was a deflection that effectively stymied any more penetrating questioning. I didn’t want to talk about it either – I enjoyed Sherman’s company, his curious grace, his hunger for life, his all-devouring eye, but I knew that sooner or later we wouldhave to confront what was going on, then there it would be, winched upright like one of his own body forms, my vast and artfully oxidized shame.

     
    Sherman finished his call and after we’d settled on our next rendezvous he joined Baltie in the Range Rover and they bumped away. I went on alone along the ridge, past fields where cattle lay as brown and glossy as the pools of their own shit. Six hundred feet below lay the amiable farmland of the Weald, while up here I simply revolved in my cloudy ball. But between Perching and Edburton hills my moodiness fused into a certainty: I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by intercontinental air travel. It was over: no more would I dutifully respond to those parental injunctions go here, go there, empty my pockets and take off my shoes. Never again would I take my underpants to see the world, which meant inturn that never would the world witness them espaliered on a hedge.
    I say fused, but disintegrated would be closer to the truth. Of course, I had always performed certain ... rituals, but doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone count the cracks and divide them by the number of paving stones? Doesn’t everyone ascribe numerical values to each action and every thing, then compute their way through the day? Doesn’t everyone listen to the fridge intently so as to be certain that its vibration calibrates with their pulse and heartbeat? Doesn’t everyone wash their hands because they touched the soap? Doesn’t everyone
know
that each digit has its own personality – feckless 2, arrogant 1, incurably romantic 9? Doesn’t everyone fear the world and their own subjectivity getting out of sync? It’s true that no one I knew personally wielded a