Once Through the Wall
by
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The traffic was all coming into London at the time – Sunday afternoon – and Bobby was facing it. That meant that he could go faster in his rented Fiat, as much as forty miles an hour. It felt suicidal at any speed, driving on the left, steering wheel on the right. If he was not to bounce off the curb (which he did twice in the thirty-some-odd minutes it took him to reach Hockham Green), he must hold his course steadily along the middle of the road. Oncoming lorries looked like his own personal doom. But he hit nothing head-on. In between near-collisions, he glimpsed Indian restaurants, factories, rows of tract houses. Leaving the outskirts of London, going roughly northwest, through Stocking and Little Wix, he was aware of more and more greenery. There was less traffic. He began to read signs, hoping for more like the one that had just caught his eye – "Free Erections." Could it be legal? Guster passed that sign twice a day. He would know if anybody would.... Better not risk it. Bobby would simply go slow on his way back, and read the smaller letters on the signboard. At Caulkford he asked directions of some men coming out of, or perhaps going back into, a pub called The Jolly Sailor. Five minutes later he was at Hockham Green. There was indeed a green, with boys playing soccer on it, and a few houses scattered here and there, partially hidden by trees and shrubbery. Bearing to the right, as Jenkins had instructed him, he stopped in front of the only house he saw on this particular lane. It was a brownish Victorian house, remodeled somewhat, kept up. Two and a half storeys, a dozen rooms, plaster, tile roof, beams, lattices, white trellises, a neat garden and a good deal of lawn. Croquet-players who weren’t there flickered through his fancy and were gone. The racket of an electric lawnmower stopped as he drove up. Behind hedges, at varying distances, other electric lawnmowers did not stop. By common consent they had chosen this hour, on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, to do what they were doing, all together, to get it over with. He had seen several in action, just before reaching the green, and just after leaving it: lightweight boxes on little wheels, blades whirring around horizontally inside. Women pushed them over the grass, managing long electric cords. The lawnmowers were like vacuum cleaners, but much louder and they didn’t ingest. Out here in the country they were audible for miles. A girl came around the hedge to the walk. "Mr. MacCready?" "Miss Guster!" "Bowker, Penny. My uncle is expecting you." "I hope I’m not interrupting anything." "Can’t say. A poet is always composing, even in his sleep." "Does the lawnmower bother him?" "Crickets and blackbirds bother him. The lawnmower puts him to sleep. He wakes up when I stop. I’ll tell him you’re here." "Shall I call you Penny?" "If you like." "I’m Bobby." She seemed to think that was funny. She said: "Will you always be Bobby?" "Always." It was a little boy’s name, a girl’s name, an old man’s name, an English cop’s name, but it was also his I.D. name, the way he thought of himself, as his own pal. If a day passed without somebody calling him that, he felt unwanted.
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About the Book
Damon Guster, a middle-aged English poet and textbook publisher, unreflectingly takes on the identity, though not the name, of his boyhood friend and teacher, Tristan Wrye. The story begins when Guster reads an item in the Times informing him that the poet Wrye, long thought dead, is now dying in a London hospital. He goes home and while brooding over Wrye he has an hallucinatory experience. An angel with a flaming pen appears, enters him and compels him to write. From this enforced collaboration comes an elegy commemorating the death of Tristan Wrye. Guster knows it is by far his best poem and will seal his reputation as the great poet of his day. There is a complication. Instead of dying, Wrye is gradually recovering. In fact he has been re-discovered as an important literary figure. Guster encourages Wrye, despite his ill health, to accept an invitation by a dubious American agency to do a tour of readings in America. He secretly follows, half hoping that Wrye will not survive the tour, half wanting to protect him. A series of misadventures now occur culminating in the death of Guster. It remains for Wrye to explain the secret that bound him and Guster together.
About the Author
For forty years John Berry and his wife, Ynez, lived on a small mountain in East Los Angeles. He sometimes wrote about this area, but most of his novels and stories have a locale elsewhere: in India, where he lived for five years, in imaginary countries, in England where he stayed for sometime in a village by the North Sea. Here he began the present novel, completing it when he returned to California. Later, he wrote a short story version that was first published in Prairie Schooner in 1976. In a series of observations called The Ocean Of Maya he writes, "Every experience is great and mysterious. May we respect it as if it were a god walking among us in the guise of a casual stranger."