Mandalay’s Opus
Why did they bring me here to make me
Not quite bad and not quite good,
Why, unless They’re wicked…
-Charlotte Mew
Hank Butler was a charmless man, and he knew it. Men had punched him, cursed him and generally loathed him. These things did not matter to Hank Butler for his greatest wish was to be known—if possible relevant—for his name to be spoken aloud, recognized when heard, and this is what kept him going. As an important book critic for a national magazine, Hank Butler’s own wife barely liked him, preferring to stay married because at her age, one definitely could do worse than Hank.
It was easy to almost take pity on Hank. He irritated waiters at restaurants just by speaking; and with his air of impossible disdainfulness, his own daughter, who upon announcing a slight affinity for the work of a poet Hank had obliterated in his column, became incensed and barely spoke to her for a week.
That poet, G.G. Mandalay, was the cause of Hank’s misery. Not only had he been sleeping with Hank’s wife, but had abrogated the romance quite distastefully in the lobby of the poor man’s building while he was away at a retreat. Not one to be cuckolded so easily, Hank made several attempts at intimacy with Mandalay’s wife, who shunned the attempts, but never told her husband.
Hank had toyed with the idea of attending one of Mandalay’s readings, but given the pure adulation that was likely to be heaped-upon Mandalay, he decided against it. What Hank missed was Mandalay’s sniping from the poet’s podium—never mentioning Hank’s reviews, only that Hank didn’t know what poetry was, and that he ought to review Danielle Steele or that hideous old bag who—what was her name?—wrote those detective novels, often giving her cat co-authorship credit.
Mandalay indeed pointed out that the cat was a bigger selling author than Hank, and this did not help Hank’s confidence. Hank sent out reconnaissance teams—his students—to Mandalay’s readings. “I will sue the motherfucker,” Hank said of his nemesis when the students reported back.
“Sue him for what?,” a student would ask.
“Slander, my boy, bloody slander.”
Mandalay regaled audiences with descriptions of encounters with the famous poets of the past. As a fresh-from-university poet in the late sixties, Mandalay noted that Ezra Pound had suggested that he go to England and translate Old and Middle English poets. The encounter never happened, of course, and Mandalay’s attempts at presenting a new and daring interpretation of The Pardoner’s Tale had actually been inspired by someone completely different: Malcolm Mandalay, his father and gifted translator who was to Chaucer as Rubinstein was to Chopin.
Sherman, the student whom Hank had sent to infiltrate Mandalay’s readings was a young and needy eighteen-year-old from Scranton who had come to New York to make his name as a poet. He had landed in Hank’s service primarily because he needed to belong to something, and at the very least, this was a start.
Hank was a young sixty. His hair remained suspiciously void of gray; his face was smooth, if coarser than previous decades; his eyes were delightfully set underneath shaped brows. His eyes glimmered, giving a false sense of modesty, though Hank was modest about nothing. Even the way he looked at you betrayed that he was the important one in a given conversation.
Hank was a lonely man, thin and frail. He could scarcely remember a time when he had read books for pleasure, as now he read only for the purpose of reviewing. Most of the books he chose were from first-time novelists or established figures—it was a good niche. He rarely reviewed mainstream books.
As a young man he had written an entire book of poems, which won a major contest for younger poets, and led to a book deal from a major publishing house in New York. It was pure luck that landed Hank in such an enviable position. However, poetry and money are like matter and anti-matter: When the follow-up book did not earn-out, Hank’s deal was canceled and no reputable agent was interested in him.
Hank gave up all notions of idealism and became a hard and linear realist. It would seem as a great tragedy of the soul that Hank fluttered down to earth wounded and bitter, were it not for his unwavering belief that it was the world that was broken and not him.
He was not sure if he had consumed the idea of being a poet, or if it consumed him. That he thought himself a failure was troubling to those who knew him best. He pondered questions like: What was a failed poet, exactly? Such clearly philosophical questions had no answer and Hank’s search for meaning yielded nothing, save for the idea that no one person would ever truly fit-in in such as world as this one.
*
Mandalay, on the other hand, had become something of a literary lion in New York. He had been the state’s poet laureate and had even been on NPR several times to read his work. Mandalay’s ten volumes remained in print and were available in nearly every city in the country; while poor Hank’s two volumes of poetry were out of print, and existed solely in ancient personal collections and a few libraries.
That Hank had been a critical thorn in Mandalay’s side had made him almost an endearing sort of nemesis. Hank’s reviews were not so much bitter as challenging; they were engaging, and seemingly the only points where his charm came through.
*
Hank had found himself in love with Mandalay’s latest book, his opus. It was remarkable because it was a book of new material, and because it was the book where Mandalay had found himself completely and utterly, a book with an arc, a book about one subject, yet with a multitude of topics. It was an unlikely second climax in the event of his career as a poetic figure, and it was a book that would place Mandalay among the great canonical figures in the American pantheon. It was, in fact, that good.
Some of the poems themselves had appeared in the famous literary reviews—the Kenyon Review’s and so forth—but interestingly, most had not. It was rather uncommon for a poet to hold back so many poems, and it was not good business either. Books of poetry generally sold anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand copies, and publishing regularly was a good way to sell more copies. Obviously.
But Mandalay had regularly sold between eighty and ninety thousand copies of his books; his Selected Poems had sold close to two-hundred thousand copies. He did not need to put his ego and work into the hands of editors for judgment. He had called his latest book simply “The Flight.”
Hank read the advanced copy, still in galley form, and wept. It was the sort of collection he should have authored—the sort of collection he would have authored in a more just world. But this was not a just world, in Hank’s estimated opinion, and he determined that Mandalay was not worthy of being brilliant, not this brilliant.
His response after reading the collection was to tear Mandalay apart somehow, but indeed how?
As he sat in his den, pondering the ways, it occurred to him and it was quite simple, actually. He would lie, cheat, steal and quite possibly shoot Mandalay if necessary—although it occurred to him that making Mandalay a martyr was probably too self-defeating. He sat and thought about it.
Dialing the phone, “Sherman, I have an assignment for you—Yes Sherman—I need you to read a manuscript—I want to tear the author apart and I need your help—no, he’s actually good—Yes I know how awkward it sounds, no I’m not drinking again—Teetotaler, Sherman.”
Eager to please his new mentor, Sherman agreed to this new and rather odd assignment of literary assassination. “Good sir—not a problem—Tear him apart, of course I will help—Is he any good?”
It was the literary equivalent of a drive-by shooting, and the goal was to write a review so incendiary, and yet so dead-on in it’s criticism that Mandalay would be embarrassed. That it would confirm that Hank’s own critics were accurate in their assessment of him as a sort of literary Luca Brasi was of no consequence.
Step one was to give the collection of poems a closer second reading. The poems wove a narrative about a young man discovering himself—discovering, that is, his capacity for evil as well as good—and was written in such a way that even a reader of poor erudition could find himself, or a part of himself inside the poems. Sherman was crying by the time he finished the last poem, and did not want to bring the author down. Nor did he want to disappoint his new master.
Hank held the book in his hands and considered his observations quietly. The poems seemed to have been written over a period of many years, for they ran the spectrum of emotion and experience. It was mostly with admiration that Hank considered that Mandalay had held many of these poems back for many years.
The greatest shock a young man receives is when he confronts his own mortality; the fact that he bleeds and that pain is not an end, but the beginning of an end, and that he too can be snuffed out the just the same as the characters in books and films are. The greatest shock of a young man’s life is that youth is pure ephemera, the sort of thing that marks its departure without notice.
There was very little chance that Hank could assail these poems, and he knew it.
It hit Sherman two days later. Upset and disappointed in Hank, Sherman had decided to spend his Saturday in the park reading Chaucer when the rain began to pour. Hurrying back to his Upper-Upper West Side apartment, which he shared with a young man to whom he had assigned the nickname “Philip the Philistine,” he had a dash of revelation about Mandalay’s poem “Changeling.”
The last stanza of Mandalay’s poem had read exactly as Charlotte Mew’s poem (of the same title) had read. Flipping open his old anthology Sherman read first with great excitement, then upon finding the Mew’s poem, with a sense of betrayal. There was no broken law here, as Mew’s poem was now in the public domain, but that wasn’t the issue at all.
He closed the anthology and replaced in on his bookshelf.
The poem Sherman had remembered in the rain had read thusly:
And They live so long and They feel no pain:
I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,
I shall never come back again
*
The news had been welcomed as rainfall after a terrible drought. It was no mirage. Hank slapped his knee and sprung from his chair to hug his capable assistant. The compliments flowed like water, and Sherman treaded lightly—he was, after all, helping to bring down a man who in his estimation had written a brilliant collection of poems, a collection which might live forever were it not for his own actions.
“Ah, I have to say,” Hank told him, “this is pretty good dirt we have here.”
Sherman agreed, but was forced to mask his contempt for Hank. He was not sure which of the two had been worse: the sinner or the judge.
Since the book was not yet published, Hank decided it was best to wait until a few days after the book was published and the initial hundred-thousand copies were printed, shipped and definitively on the shelves at bookstores, to begin his assault. As Hank’s review would appear in the magazine three days after the book’s publication, he would submit his review at the last possible moment—the night before printing—and thus assure no inquiry before either the book or the review were published.
In the intervening time, he need only relax and write his review and hope that Mandalay would not discover his own carelessness and withdraw the poem or postpone the publication of the collection. To that end, Hank’s demeanor and attitude toward life improved greatly. He greeted each morning with a great deal of vigor—of the sort that his wife had not noticed in years. Her attempts at discovering the nature of his new-found love of life yielded no answers.
Sherman spoke infrequently to Hank in the time after he had brought the plagiarism to Hank’s attention. Mostly he was disgusted and desiring to do to Hank what Hank was going to G.G. Mandalay. Disgusted, he called home and then purchased a one-way ticket to Scranton.
As the seasons changed, Hank felt the novelty of the revenge wear-off somewhat, renewed only by seeing Mandalay featured in magazines and interviews. The man was obviously an egotist, Hank comforted himself by thinking. Still, he was sure that watching the public humiliation would be enough to justify his efforts—and indeed, he regarded his efforts as a public service.
On the day of the book’s publication, Mandalay appeared on the morning shows, on radio shows and finally, as the subject of a late night talk show. Rumors began to circulate that Mandalay would be appointed the nation’s next Poet Laureate. Nothing else happened.
Nothing else happened because very few people read Hank’s review. Buried in the back of the magazine, no one in the news media took any notice of Hank’s charges, at least not initially. It was in-fact Hank himself who fired off e-mails to the New York Times and Washington Post—with duplicates sent to the publisher as well as Mandalay himself.
Within twenty-four hours, Mandalay’s plagiarism was the talk of literary circles along the eastern seaboard. Mandalay, who had taken off a semester from teaching, was publicly humiliated. His publisher immediately withdrew the book and many bookstores refused to sell any more copies—the independent booksellers went so far as to trash all their copies entirely.
Even the evening news ran with the story: Highly regarded poet falls from grace, read the focus-group created television anchor, from his teleprompter.
G.G. Mandalay was not asked to return, or rather, was asked not to return to his teaching post next semester. His books were scrutinized by academics as well as his former publisher for further evidence of plagiarism. Within a few weeks, Mandalay was under fire for appropriating themes and sentiments unlawfully. Descendents of Charlotte Mew expressed disdain for Mandalay and requested that “all his books be burned.”
In his own defense, Mandalay said only that he had no explanation for the “apparent appropriation” of someone else’s words, but that he also had no explanation as to why such an outrage was occurring over such a trivial matter, and that since the rest of his book was not plagiarized, but was in fact meritorious, that perhaps the whole matter had simply been blown out of proportion.
“Blown out of proportion,” Hank scoffed, “What nerve! What gall.”
Hank was not a smoker, but he lit-up a cigar for the book burning. With copies of each of Mandalay’s book, he set them ablaze on his balcony one-by-one and watched them burn to ashes. They were among last copies of Mandalay’s books to be sold for quite some time. Despite the notoriety, no one was particularly willing to spend $25 to read the plagiarized words of a particularly boring poet—because, that was what Mandalay’s opus, which he had spent forty years writing, had become. That one stanza, from an unremarkable poem, now defined his life’s work.
Hank thought of all the breaks that Mandalay had gotten, but that he had not gotten. As each book burned, he thought of all the times his life seemed to him to have turned-out differently than he had dreamed. He realized in a brief moment of honest introspection, that this was all a tantrum, and that he had destroyed a part of himself in destroying Mandalay.
For his part, Mandalay published an essay in the Sunday times complimenting Hank on his work, suggesting that Hank had knocked him off his pedestal and had probably prevented him from squandering any more of his life on self-promotion. For “it matters not,” he wrote “what other people think of my character, but how I enjoy the living of my life. In my benign literary crime, I have at once removed myself from the canon for a generation … long enough, to live my life and eventually die. Perhaps my work will be re-evaluated in future generations.”
Hank put down the paper and thought about what it meant to win, and about what he had ostensibly won. Gratification, to be sure, although it was merely the gratification of having defeated a rival. Hank relaxed and felt good about life, though like everything else, the feeling was short-lived.
