Absolution by Patrick Flanery Read Free Book Online Page A

is obviously Clare’s study – is a test of my trustworthiness. A moment later one set of bookshelves swivels across the floor and Clare emerges from an adjoining room.
She looks more relaxed today, dressed in a long white smock and blue slacks, her hair loose around her face, feet bare. She sits behind her desk. Intimacy, but mediated. Without looking at me, she pages through her desk diary. After a moment she says, ‘Yes? All right.’ I turn on the voice recorder, uncap my pen, and open my notebook.
‘Yesterday, I was beginning to ask you about “Black Tongue”.’
‘Yes.’ She still looks down, turning the pages of her diary.
‘You write movingly about the effects of censorship on writers. I wonder if you could speak at a more personal level, about the ways in which the possibility of censorship affected your own writing?’
Her lips part and she blows out a stream of air. Adjusting the diary so that it is square on the desk, she turns the pages, but I think I see her glancing peripherally at the garden, where a man is pruning an already compact-looking bush whose name I don’t know, though I can recognize it as some kind of indigenous shrub. Such plants should make me feel at home, but their musky, wild animal smell always catches me by surprise, like a mugging.
‘I would have thought that the essay could be read either personally or impersonally – relevant either to all writers who find themselves working under the threat of censorship, or just one particular writer,’ she says, punctuating the sentence with a distracted cough that I’m beginning to recognize as one of her conversational tics – the cough, the snort, the involuntary throat-clearing.
‘Are you inviting me to read it that way?’ I hesitate in asking a question like this; I know she resists being asked to interpret her own words. A colleague of mine once wrote to ask Clare what she meant by a particular passage in one of the novels that referred obliquely to Sophocles. She responded politely but firmly, ‘The sentence says …’ and quoted the line verbatim without further comment. The text spoke the meaning, and she could or would do nothing to explain it.
‘It would be ridiculous not to read it that way, given what I have just said.’
‘You argue that institutionalized censorship tends to empower individuals with “unsubtle minds” and that the ideal censor, if censorship must be practised, would be someone like yourself – reflective, academic, widely read, a rationalist, someone with an objective mind.’ Her eyes flicker briefly up to mine, as if to say, Don’t even try, flattery is futile . She puts away the diary and begins shuffling papers on her desk, moving them from one pileto another. It’s a game to show me that I’m unimportant, that her mind needs more to occupy it than my facile questioning.
‘I don’t think those are quite my words, but yes, broadly, that was my argument,’ she finally says, giving me another quick glance before looking down again, absorbed by a pile of recycled envelopes.
‘The problem, you say, is that people like you would never choose to be a censor, because there could be no more painful work than being forced to read works – books, magazines, articles, poems – not of your own choice. And one would think, also, that it would be anathema to a writer – particularly one like yourself – to have to ferret out offensive works and bar their publication.’
‘If one could ever agree on a universal standard of offence.’ A little cough again, clearing the throat, and a surprising, girlish toss of the hair, another peek at the gardener and a tight pursing of the lips. She opens the window, calls out to the man in words I don’t understand. They’re full of politeness, and a smile that looks genuine spreads across her face as she bows her head. The gardener responds, smiles (not so genuinely, I think), bows his own head and leaves the shrub alone.
‘It’s the wrong season for that.