Free The Last Samurai by Helen de Witt

this and that, showing me souvenirs from his travels and making comments by turns cynical and sentimental. He had a new computer, an Amstrad 1512 with two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives and 512 kilobytes of RAM. He said he had installed Norton Utilities to organise his files, and he turned it on to show how Norton Utilities worked.
    I asked if it could do Greek. He said he didn’t think so, so I didn’t ask whether it could do anything else.
    We sat down and to my horror I saw on a nearby small table a brand new book by Lord Leighton.
    By Lord Leighton, of course, I don’t mean the Hellenising late-Victorian painter of A Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession and Greek Girls Playing at Ball, but the painterly American writer who is the spiritual heir of the artist. Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting. His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. Only the pen of Lord Leighton the writer could do justice to the brush of Lord Leighton the painter, for just so did Lord Leighton (the writer) bring the most agitated emotions to an airless to a hushed to an unhurried while each word took on because there was all the time in the world for each word to take on the bloom which only a great Master can give to a word using his time to allow all unseemly energy to become aware of its nakedness and snatch gratefully at the fig leaf provided until all passion in the airlessness in the hush in the absence of hurry sank decently down in the slow death of motion to perpetual stasis: a character could not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air.
    Liberace saw my glance and said Are you a fan and I said No and he said But he’s marvellous.
    He picked up the book and began to read one lovely sentence after another—
    & I said in despair How beautiful, as one might say Look at that feather! Look at the velvet! Look at the fur!
    I have naturally often thought that it would be nice to get some money from Liberace for Ludo, and I have sometimes thought that even apart from the money I should tell him. Whenever I think this I think of this conversation and I just can’t.
    I would say But he is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song he is like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction
    and he would say Listen to this
    and he would read out a sentence which was like Yesterday with Brahmsian harmony or the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction by special request
    and I would say He is like a man who plays the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata so slowly he makes mistakes, these logical fallacies are more glaring because he has so much the air of taking his time
    and Liberace would say But listen to this
    and he would read out a lovely sentence full of logical mistakes
    and I would say Or rather he is like a man who plays the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata with dazzling virtuosity & complete ignorance of the music, Schnabel’s teacher once told him that he was a musician but he would never be a pianist & this writer is exactly the opposite
    and Liberace would say Yes, but listen to this
    and he would read out a sentence which was the work of a stupid virtuoso
    and he never did seem to see what I meant. Lord Leighton was like this and like that and the other & he was like a man who piles mattresses on a pebble & I was like the princess & the pea, I was not going to say something about English & the American novel to be told I was engaging so I drank my drink and when