Three times a year I’d take a train to Paddington, cross London, and meet my pal, Joe Hyam, at a scruffy curry restaurant on the Aldwych. We’d lunch, then move to a pub across the Thames. We’d start talking promptly at 12.30 pm and only cease at about 6.30 pm when I took the tube back to Paddington and thence the train to Hereford.
We conversed, I suppose, so the end result must have been a conversation. Joe died in March 2014 so those lengthy, noisy, often impassioned exchanges are now an aural blur. The subjects would have been obvious since they were all shared: blogging, books, France, magazine editorship. Yet not a single strand remains in my memory banks. Hence my initial question. It’s as if making conversation came close to the creation of a fishing net – a mass of holes encircling emptiness and tied together with string.
From more than a dozen lunches and boozing sessions, nothing! One exception: I’d just started writing sonnets and tended to fill up my iambic pentameter with over-long, polysyllabic words. Was this a failing I asked Joe, a poetry expert. No, he said, and we switched to other things.
I could of course consult the posts I wrote at the time but that’s not the point. Why the void? One reason might be the talk was fast and intense. We spoke for the moment not for posterity. Also, it was like a relay race – pass the baton and it came back a different shape. It’s a big claim but I may fairly say our chat was original. Both of us regarded cliché as a sin against the human spirit.
All gone, except it seemed worthwhile at the time. And I for one looked forward to it.
Oh, I am sorry to hear about Joe. I bet you had times so good in the past that only the feeling of them will be remembered. Words aren't everything.
ReplyDeleteTom: There is a further possible explanation why those conversational details were hard to recall. Our friendship dated back to 1963 when I - having been made redundant from MotorCycling magazine - was transferred to Materials Handling News, a magazine Joe had recently started to edit. My job on MHN (as sub-editor) was completely new and had been created not by Joe but by Joe's boss, the divisional managing director. Thus I found myself in the peculiar position of correcting the written material of the person (Joe) who was my editorial superior.
ReplyDeleteIt could have been a recipe for lifelong animosity (no writer enjoys having his stuff edited) instead it blossomed. Our families went on holiday in France together and when I returned from the USA I was offered (and took) a position on one of the magazines Joe had charge of.
Thus when we met for the lunches I describe above we could draw on shared experience going back nearly fifty years. Such conversations tend to be allusive since there is no need to explain the background to given topics. And those fragmentary bits and pieces don't stick in the mind.
I can't say that I have the sort of mind that retains pieces of conversation. And I regret it; I seem to have the sort that retains the small things writers find useful and dumps many things I would like to recall. Meanwhile my husband often tells me interesting things that my late father said--there's the luck of a retentive memory.
DeleteLovely post, you know--gives a real sense of the bond, even without his words.
Marly: I think you may be right to regret it. It might be symptomatic of a desire to talk rather than to listen. Though knowing you as I do I would say this is unlikely. The testing time occurs when someone asks you to describe another person, other than physically. Behaviour is difficult to entrap, conversational quotes can be useful in this instance.
DeleteHusband/wife combinations are strange melting pots - to mix a metaphor. For instance VR, my wife, has an entirely different view of my mother from me. I find VR's anecdotes endlessly fascinating.
Sounds like a great friend, and exciting conversation. You may not remember the words, but the experience has stayed with you. Friends like that are few and far between for most people.
ReplyDeleteColette: I suppose it's enough to say I was totally absorbed during those afternoons and that being continuously absorbed for several hours is what counts. The conversation was merely a means to an end
DeleteConversational content does fade from memory, but the emotional content often stays a much longer time. Your heart recalls the full content of friendship.
ReplyDeleterobin andrea: There may be a (rather stretched) literary analogy. One remembers, say, the colour of a knitted pullover but not the stitches. Or a car journey which passed through impressive scenery while forgetting the interior details of the car.
DeleteI miss Joe's posts and his eye for subjects of his camera ... I remember an angel he caught in his lens ... I wish I knew the answer to why the void?
ReplyDeleteZu Schwer: Now here's detail in another context I do remember, perhaps because it was written rather than spoken. Your pleased reaction to Joe's first comment on your blog.
ReplyDeleteYou remind me that he was was a good photographer. I acknowledge this intellectually but, because, I am a "written" person more than a "visual" person what I most remember about his blog is his writing style: gentle, deferential, elliptical, laconic. Notably a reference to a restaurant we'd both eaten at on different occasions and where Joe found his meal to be "indifferent". A beautifully chosen adjective.