inspo/funny

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a daily schedule you try to stick to when you’re working?

MOODY

No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother. Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, fornicate, blaspheme, bless a street urchin, browbeat a civil servant, and when you’re done with these things, if you feel excited by what you’ve seen and heard, then go write.

—I’m a writer, he answered.

—Oh. What sort of thing do you do? Esther asked, dropping the weight of his hand, and looking down as though she expected to see it drop to the floor.

—Write.

—Yes, but . . . ah . . . fiction?

—My book has been translated into nineteen languages.

—I must know it, Esther said. —I must know of it.

—Doubt it, said the modest author. —Never been published.

—But you said . . .

—I’ve translated it myself. Nineteen languages. Only sixty-six more to go, not counting dialects. It’s Celtic now. A lovely language, Celtic. It only took me eight months to learn Celtic. It ought to go in Celtic.

—You mean be published?

—Yes, published in Celtic. Sooner or later I’ll hit a language where they’ll publish it. Then I can retire to the country. That’s all I want, to retire to the country. Erse is next.

—It must be an awfully dirty book, said Buster.

Mr. Crotcher gave him a look of firm academic hatred which no amount of love, in any expression, could hope to erase. —It is a novel about ant life, he said.

After the bishop's speech and the king's reply, his Majesty took his place under the canopy; then he kneeled very devoutly on a cushion near the altar. The chancel was surrounded by stalls, and the stalls were elevated two steps above the stone floor. On the higher of these Julien was seated at M. Chelan's feet, very like a trainbearer close to his cardinal at the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There was a Te Deum, clouds of incense, and countless rounds fired by the musketry and the artillery; the peasants were drunk with happiness and piety. day like this can undo the work of a hundred editions of the Jacobin papers.

Since the subject of Lizzie Scherer has come up I may as well give some further account of her. I began to love Lizzie after I realized how much she loved me. As does sometimes happen, her love impressed me, then attracted me. I was directing a season of Shakespeare. She fell in love with me during Romeo and Juliet, she revealed her love during Twelfth Night, we got to know each other during A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then (but that was later) I began to love her during The Tempest, and (but that was later still) I left her during Measure for Measure (when Aloysius Bull was playing the Duke). I recall very clearly that occasion when I first realized that Lizzie loved me. She was playing Viola. (This was during Lizzie’s brief ‘shining period’, her annus mirabilis.) It was the production in which Wilfred Dunning, who usually played Sir Toby Belch, suddenly insisted on playing Malvolio. At least, he did not insist, I let him. It was a marvel but it wrecked the production. Lizzie and I were alone in a rather draughty church hall which for some reason was all we could get at that moment to rehearse in. It was a winter’s evening and I remember the place as being lit with gas. Lizzie (now in Act two, Scene four) got as far as ‘she never told her love’. Then she stopped and seemed to choke and uttered no more. I thought at first that this was her own extremely effective idea of how to speak the speech, and I waited for her to go on. She gazed at me. Then huge glistening tears rose into her eyes. When I realized what the matter was I began to laugh and laugh and laugh, and after a bit Lizzie laughed, laughing and crying helplessly. And I loved her for that laughter too. She was a good girl. She is a good girl.

There was one thing. In his jungle prison Rex Ivory had, as before, composed poetrywhich he memorized there, since any scrap of paper was conserved for the coded casualty lists. An eminent publisher stood ready to sacrifice a portion of hoarded postwar paper to the awaited volume. None of this was unpredictable. What had not been expected was that the verses from the Malayan death camp, when transcribed, would be found to celebrate, exclusively and inexorably, the streams and hedgerows of Derbyshire.

There were other heroes by then, and other manuscripts. Public interest in Rex Ivory was waning, the paper shortage intensifying. At a top-level meeting held on a wet Saturday morning at the publishing house, it was felt that certain of the poemsin particular, one concerning a lapwinginvited critical derision. Availing themselves of an Act-of-God clause, the publishers withdrew from the contract. And The Half-Reap'd Field appeared, like earlier volumes, under an obscure imprint at the author's expense.

I still came from Dublin and my name was still Richard. I had been trying to get into one of the 362 struggling Dublin boy bands, but my problem was I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be the cute one or the moody one. Because of the intense competition you had to start specialising very young; that’s a big decision to make at 17. I kept putting it off and meanwhile younger guys who had got their act together were going to auditions and getting lucky.