The Extinction of Menai. Chuma Nwokolo
HUMPHREY CHOW
London | 18th March, 2005
‘This could have been great, Humphrey,’ said Malcolm Frisbee.
He was breathing heavily as he approached the end of his exertions. It was the week after my return from Scotland, and we were dining in the seventh-floor restaurant of Tate Modern. His final forkful of lamb paused on the lip of its plate, in the midst of the wreck of our lunch. With his other hand he tapped the plastic folder that contained my short story, which had lain bereft on one side of the table while the main business of the food was sorted. On the folder was stencilled the famous red and black initials IMX. He ate the last of his lamb and sighed regretfully. ‘It could have been really, really great.’
I poked miserably at the remains of my Cornish haddock.
We occupied a table for four, whose surface was barely enough for the main courses that had eventually sated Malcolm’s appetite. Malcolm stood six foot three in his socks and weighed a hundred and forty kilogrammes. He had won the Booker Prize at twenty-six with his first novel, Sundance. That early coup made his reputation, but it also put him under immense pressure for a second book worthy of a Booker Prize winner. In the six desperate years following Sundance, he suffered acute literary agonies, which ended in a writing vacation on a remote Greek island, where he ate a poisoned crab. He was in a coma for weeks. When he recovered, it was without his midterm memory, which elevated the challenge of a second Malcolm Frisbee novel to the level of the scaling of the Pennines by a heavily pregnant amputee.
It would have been another Greek tragedy, except that all that had taken place thirty-six years ago. Malcolm was now chairman of one of the most successful literary agencies in Europe. He was reluctantly approaching seventy but still had two unrelenting passions: the love of a good story, and a regularly indulged love of good food. In his career as a literary agent, he had represented eighteen Booker and six Pulitzer Prize winners.
He brought his passions together in his business model. Few London executives could rival his entertainment budget. He was on a first-name basis with celebrity chefs up and down the country, for he had the sort of appetite that reverberated from restaurant floor all the way to the nerve centres of the most distinguished kitchens. Malcolm snared his authors over expensive, languid dinners and sacked them over courteous, cheap lunches. In between, there were restaurant sessions to mark new books, new prizes, and the opening of promising new eateries.
For the past year I had been steeling myself to turn down a Malcolm Frisbee invitation to lunch. I was married to Grace Meadows, his favourite agent, but even that connection had its limitations. My first and only book, Blank, had been booed by the critics and shunned by the bookshops, but I had been picked for the Richard and Judy Show and notched up pretty good sales on Amazon. Had I received a lunch invitation during the barren months that preceded my Scottish writing retreat, I’d have declined and sent in a letter quitting Malcolm’s agency with some dignity. It wasn’t that clear that morning when Ruby, one of the clutch of personal assistants that he called his memory bank, phoned me to schedule an ‘eat with the boss.’ For one thing, Grace would have warned me if my representation was on the line. For another, Lynn had liked my bomber story. It worried her, but she was sure she could sell it.
She had also told me, confidentially, that Malcolm liked my story as well. Because I had written two IMX agents into my story, it had gone round in a viral e-mail on the IMX intranet. The word was, the chairman had actually read—and liked—it! When the lunch date was made, I had thought I’d written myself back into the good graces of the most aggressive literary agent in London.
Just then, it was beginning to look like his traditional terminal lunch.
‘Lynn said you liked it,’ I ventured.
Four fat fingers shooed away the very thought. ‘I’m not in this business to like stories, Humphrey Chow. I’m in this business to sell ’em.’
‘But . . .’
‘And to sell a story, I have got to love it. Like is nothing. Comprehend?’
I nodded silently, filling my mouth with food, so I didn’t have to say anything. Through the clear plate glass of the restaurant was a view of the Thames on a sunny day, but it was lost on me. Although I knew the score, that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Literary agents needed working writers: young writers who were actively writing or older writers with a decent backlist. I had to accept Grace’s jibe: IMX had kept me on their books because I was married to her. Presently, the plates were cleared away and I helped Malcolm drain a second bottle of a bland 2001 Gigondas.
‘You must be wondering why I asked you to lunch, and here of all places,’ he said finally, staring with the vague disdain of a sated appetite at a tray of steamed mussels proceeding by waitress to a patron at the far end of the busy restaurant.
It occurred to me that Malcolm had to have a streak of sadism. ‘It’s truly a lovely view,’ I said.
His two hands combined to shoo away the very thought. ‘Nonsense. Come, I’ll show you.’ By the time he had readied himself to rise, the bill was approaching him. It was intercepted by Ruby, who had been working her boss’s phones from the café. All the same, the canny waiter persisted with a courtesy visit to our table, and Malcolm rewarded him with a superfluous tip. He made his way out of the restaurant, fielding the smiles and waves of the waiting staff like an A-list celebrity.
Malcolm Frisbee was famous for his irrational tips. The restaurant menu had warned that a 12.5 percent ‘discretionary’ service commission would be compulsorily added to the bill, but Malcolm had survived a crab poisoning that had ended his first career, and as a means of getting restaurant staff fully on his side, he indulged a fetish for fat tips.
We caught the lift down to the fifth floor. I followed Malcolm into the first gallery, where a special exhibit was running. It was called Beyond Painting. We stood before an elderly picture frame. It seemed fatally damaged, with a single diagonal slash running some twelve or so centimetres down the middle of an unpainted canvas.
‘What do you think?’ In his crumpled, blue linen jacket he was the quintessential arts professor examining a degree student.
I panicked, ‘Of this?’
‘Yes.’
I took two steps back, but the explanatory card was still too far to the left to read surreptitiously. I was between the devil of a slashed canvas and the deep blue sea of a confession of artistic ignorance. ‘You mean this very canvas?’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘It is a Lucio Fontana. Surely you know Lucio Fontana.’
‘Of course,’ I lied, clearing my throat. I did not know much about art: my formal education had holes in it wide enough to sink a college building. To my eye it did seem like an unfortunate studio accident that had aborted a great master’s attempt to paint . . . but it was hanging in a gallery of Tate Modern. Not to consider it an artistic disaster seemed safer. ‘It’s a unique concept, a daring painting.’
‘It is not a painting,’ Malcolm responded. Three female London-art-student types in flip-flops drifted closer, making no secret of their interest in our conversation. Their overlong jeans had fraying bell-bottoms as capacious as skirts and trailed loose threads, causing other visitors to give their wake a wide berth. Malcolm continued, modulating his voice to accommodate his new audience, ‘If you notice, the canvas is untainted by paint. The only pigmentation on it will be the discolouration of age. It’s just the slash; notice the centrality of cut to canvas, notice the new, third dimension it conveys to the previous linearity of the artwork, its boldness . . .’
‘Exactly,’ I said, warming to the subject. ‘Its uniqueness—’
‘Rubbish,’ Malcolm interrupted, reaping a brace of nods from his new listeners. ‘It’s not unique; everyone who can afford a blade is slashing canvases these days. Pay attention, Humphrey Chow. Back in 1955 when Fontana had the gumption to present this