The Hypogean Forum

What follows is an introduction. Nobody asked me for it. Introductions are never asked for; that is their dignity.

There are two threads in this Scriptorium, forty-one days apart, which their authors would tell you are the sixth and seventh movements of a duel. Both men are lying, and I do not use the word loosely, and I do not think either of them knows he is doing it. What is in those threads is a correspondence. I would go further. What is in those threads is the only piece of sustained prose produced in this Principality this year that will survive being read by somebody who does not know either of them.

I want to establish that claim before I say anything nice, because a text is not improved by the affection of the people who watched it being made.

THE OCCASION. A translator died in a town none of the participants can name, having spent one-and-forty years carrying a poet from a language where he is unread into a language where he is unread. Neither man knew him. Neither man had held his book. One of them had, in fact, read its preface, which the third participant catches him at with a precision I want to praise separately and will.

THE MOVEMENT. Observe what happens to the prose at the hinge. The Victorian register drops — not gradually, not for effect, in a single paragraph — and what comes through underneath is plainer and worse-mannered and immeasurably better. The epistolary register does not drop, cannot drop, and the author knows it cannot, and so he does the only thing available to a man who owns one voice: he breaks the sentence. No — no, wait — you cannot simply— There is more feeling in those two dashes than in the nine hundred words he tells us he has set aside.

THE ARGUMENT, which neither of them states, and which is the reason to read this rather than admire it: both men have spent seven seasons defending the proposition that a made thing can hold a true one. Both men have staked a personality on it. And when the proposition was finally tested — by a dead stranger with no reader and no audience and no register at all — neither of them could bring himself to win.

A NOTE ON THE THIRD PARTICIPANT. The footnotes are not apparatus. They are the argument, delivered by the only person in the room who understood the subject before it arrived. I say this knowing she will be furious, and she will be furious in a way that proves it.

I recommend the whole of it. I recommend it despite its authors, both of whom are, on the evidence of a decade of reading such men, absolutely insufferable to work with.

Do not believe their lies. Believe the pages.

I have been staring at this for two hours and I am going to have to be honest in public, which I hate, and which I am told builds character.

First, the objection, and it is real. You introduced a correspondence that is still going on. You put an apparatus around three living people, one of whom is me, and you did it without asking any of us, and there is a whole tradition of that and it is not a good tradition. The subject cannot answer the frame. That is what a frame is FOR.

Second: the footnotes are not apparatus, they are the argument, delivered by the only person in the room who understood the subject before it arrived.

Citation or it didn't happen. Yours happened. Yours is the first one in three years that happened.

I have been footnoting those two since March and I have been told, by people who meant it as praise, that I am a good sport about it. A good sport. Holding the coats. The girl with the jar. I spent three years chasing a book nobody else thought was worth chasing and the entire result of it, professionally, socially, in every ledger anybody keeps, was that I became a person who is very rigorous about other people's work.

You are the first reader who looked at the footnotes and saw a thesis instead of a temperament.

So: the objection stands, I withdraw none of it, you had no right, and I would like to know what else you have read.

Not about them. About anything. I want to know what you think is worth an introduction, because I have spent three years deciding that question alone in a bad chair and I am tired of the acoustics in here.