PREFACE

This is the Preface to what follows, written in 1987 when I looked like this:

This is how it goes:


If I do not find success in the literary field I am going to take up the crumhorn before it goes out of fashion. I don’t really expect to achieve lasting fame as a crumhorn player, but I couldn’t do worse than I am as a writer of idiosyncratic belles letters as-yet unrecognised by the literary world.

These stories may lack the subtlety of Chekov, but then who’s Chekov? Isn’t he the one who played chess with Boris Portnoy? What does a chess player know about writing stories anyway?

Oh how I long for a patron: an enlightened despot with an eye for an amusing and clever young man with golden hair and voluptuous lips. A philosopher-king who delights in the company of brilliant youth. In the days of Absolute Monarchy a young man might get somewhere if he showed a little ankle. Nowadays it is not enough to be young and beautiful and brilliant – you have to be a salesman. If I had wanted to be a salesman I would have become a salesman.

I could offer pre-socratic philosophy at homespun prices. A bargain like that would surely be marketable.

I have been accused of being glib. This is unfair. When you get to know me you’ll find I am also facile. At first you may think that behind the façade I am superficial, but I have hidden depths. I know because I hid them myself.

I am not one of literatures profligate sons who squander their talen in and out of bars; I am a recluse, living a herbert-like existence. Under these circumstances one inevitably turns to the world of the imagination, only emerging at mealtimes.

I am a fabricator of self-evident fictions. A weaver of brightly coloured verbal tapestries.

I am completely ignored.

I wouldn’t mind being reviled. I wouldn’t mind being obliged to flatter an obscene monarch for my daily bread. What I cannot stand is being ignored.

These are my wilderness years.

I am a voice in the wilderness.

Won’t somebody take me up to the high places?

I am contemplating suicide.

It’s a career move.

My suicide will not be a pitiful cry for help that goes unheard.


My suicide will be an existentialist statement.

That goes unheard.

A magnificent gesture of scorn for an indifferent world. I am going to immerse myself in aspic with two fingers in the air and a crayfish on my nose, with a side salad consisting of half a tomato and three slices of cucumber.







According to MENSA man can survive on a vocabulary of 24 words.

That makes my career pointless, somewhat.

Nevermind, everything will be all right once I’ve got a hang of the crumhorn.