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Cochran

A friend of mine said “Would you like to meet Cochran?”

“Sure, what writer wouldn’t? But what would I say?”

“You don’t have to say anything. He’ll do most of the talking. If there’s silence, even long silences, there’s silence, but then he or I will say something or the visit will be over. Here, I’ll call him. I’m sure he’d like to meet you.”

“Why would he?”

“Because you’re my friend and a writer.”

He called Cochran from a telephone booth. Cochran said for them to meet him in the bar downstairs in the building he lives in. We went there. He wasn’t there. We ordered a glass of wine each and waited.

“I’m surprised,” my friend said. “He’s usually so prompt.”

“Maybe he meant another day or another hour.”

“No, he specifically said he’ll meet us in exactly twenty minutes in this bar and please don’t be late. Also, he could only give us half an hour.”

“That’s better than nothing. Fact is, it’s something I never expected, ever. I knew you knew him, but I didn’t know how well and didn’t want to ask because I thought you might think I was pushing for a meeting with him. Where do you know him from?”

“Oh, I get around.”

Just then Cochran came into the bar, but from the street entrance, not the one to the apartment building. He put out his hand to me and said “Cochran. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’ve been a long-time admirer of your work.”

“Please, I’m sure you haven’t read my work. It hardly gets around and there’s so little of it.”

“Take my word, son. I’ve read it. So, what are you boys drinking? Wine? Have another on me.” He ordered a glass of white wine for himself, refills for us, and some bar food for us all. “Have some,” he said. “It’s delicious.”

“What is it?” I said. “I don’t recognize it. I only ask because if it’s shrimp or anything even close in the shrimp family—langoustines, for example—I’m allergic to it.”

“It’s shrimp,” he said. “You no doubt couldn’t tell because the shells have been removed. I was also fooled the first time. I’ll order something else for you.”

“Really, I’m not hungry.”

“I insist. You’re young; you have to eat.” He ordered something else. But he spoke so rapidly to the waiter that I again didn’t make out what it was. “No meat in it of any kind,” he said to me, “so you’re safe. Now, let’s talk about your work while we have one more drink. Or I’ll have; you two can stay here for as long as you want and drink on me. The waiter will put it on my tab.”

He went on and on about my work. What he liked, what he didn’t think particularly worked but could easily be repaired, because it was too good to toss out; what he thought was original. He’d obviously read both my books, or a lot of each of them.

“May I now say what I think about your fiction?” I said. “Especially, the short prose. What I have to say is all good, believe me. And I’m not saying that because of the kind things you said about my stuff.”

“Stuff. Oh, I love that. No, my friend, I have to go, and please don’t save it for another time. I mean, we might meet again—I’ve enjoyed our brief conversation—but I get extremely uncomfortable when someone even alludes to my work in front of me, no matter how high the praise. No, I correct myself. Higher the praise, worse I feel. So.” He drank up, shook our hands, patted my shoulder and left through the street door.

“He lives upstairs, as you know,” my friend said, “and could have got to his building’s lobby through that door there. But he likes leaving the bar and entering his building from the street, don’t ask me why.”

“Maybe he went for a walk or had an errand to do.”

“That could be true too, though I know he wasn’t planning to. He told me on the phone that after he leaves us he was going to take a half-hour nap, which he does daily at precisely this time.”

We didn’t take Cochran up on his offer for us to run up his tab. We drained our glasses, left, and I went back to my hotel and immediately sat at my tiny work table and started to write about my meeting with him. But the account was so much about me—what the great writer thought of the much younger writer’s work and how it made the younger writer feel—giddy; ecstatic—that it seemed so silly and self-aggrandizing a piece that I tore it up. Maybe one day I’ll write about it, I thought, although so many other writers, young and old, have written about their first and usually only meeting with him, that I doubt I could have anything new to say. Anyway, I met him. I liked him. He was the way I felt a very successful serious writer should be. Warm, personable, courteous, modest, affable, and it was generous of him to want to talk only about my work. It didn’t take me long to realize he did that so he wouldn’t have to talk about his own work. I don’t like talking about mine either, or haven’t since that meeting.

Cochran checked himself into a small simple nursing home in the city a year later. He told friends that after sixty years of writing without let-up he was finished with it for good. He refused to see any visitors at this home but his niece, lawyer and long-time publisher, and the word was that he didn’t think he’d ever leave there or else didn’t think he’d want to.

A few months after that I got a letter from his lawyer saying that Cochran had given me his one-room writing studio in a building a short walk from his apartment. He owned the studio outright, as he did his apartment, and the maintenance fees for it were paid up for the next five years. The only things I’d have to take care of were gas and electricity. “All Mr. Cochran asks of you,” the letter said, “is that you not try to thank him by letter or telephone or visiting the nursing home.”

I called my friend, who already knew about my getting the studio, and said “Why would he give me it? You know better than anyone that I had no connection to him but a half-hour’s talk.”

“Beats me,” he said. “I saw him a couple of times since that day and he never mentioned you once, not even ‘How’s your friend?’ I don’t know if you know—it’s in the recent J.T. Christophe bio of him—but it was the only place he wrote in other than his cottage in the country, and that he gave to the village it was in to be used as a public library, along with enough money to convert it. As for the studio, no one, for more than forty years, has been in there except Cochran, the housekeeper who came every other week to tidy it up, and the occasional plumber and electrician if something went awry. Not even his wife was allowed in it. Maybe he liked your work even more than he said that day and thought giving you the studio he’ll never use again and with everything paid up, will be an incentive for you to continue to write. And his wife died a couple of years ago, as you probably know—not by her own hand, as your wife did, and nowhere near as young as yours, though just as ill—so maybe there’s something in that too.”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” I said. “By the way, you ever write about him? I never saw anything and you never spoke about it.”

“No, never, and not just because he wouldn’t have wanted me to. He scorned writers who wrote memoirs, especially those who included him in theirs or published their personal encounters with him. He never read these accounts and cut off anyone who wrote about him. You?”

“For that one meeting? Nah. I kept it all in my head. Let me just ask you, though. What did you talk about with him those last times?”

“A variety of things. Sports, visual art, modern Italian poetry. Homer, Rabelais, Heine, Musil. The street he lives on. What he saw from his windows. The pigeons he fed on his window sill. Good scotch. How in his next life he was going to become a serious bird watcher and maybe even a park ranger or fire tower warden. A dog he had as a boy. And when he was in his cups, a lot about his sister, who also died young and whom it was obvious he adored. Did the lawyer say how you can get into the studio?”

“The concierge of the building it’s in.”

I got the keys from the concierge. It was an ordinary looking walk-up. The studio was on the third floor and I unlocked the door. It was a small room, about twelve by fourteen feet, with an alcove a little more than half that, which had a toilet but no door to it. The only furniture was a school desk that was just to the left of the only window, a wall lamp facing the desk, a kitchen chair and a bookcase put together out of bricks and three wood boards, with about fifteen books in it. One was by my friend, his first, probably inscribed. Another was a Spanish translation of one of Cochran’s. Rabelais’s two big books in one volume in French and a few other books in French by writers I never heard of except for Gide. I looked to see if it was inscribed, for it’d be worth a lot of money, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t anything on the walls but that one lamp. A typewriter was on the desk with no cover on it. I turned on the wall lamp and sat at the desk. The chair was uncomfortable. I’d have to get a cushion for it, I thought. The lamp didn’t provide much light. I’d need a higher-wattage bulb for it and maybe even a new floor lamp. The typewriter was an old portable, the same Italian-made model my mother gave me when I graduated college and which I wrote on for five years till it seemed my fingers got too fat for the keys and I bought the Swiss-made standard model I still use today.

There was about half a ream of paper on the shelf under the top of the desk, the place a schoolboy would put his books and loose-leaf binder. I took some paper out, put it on the desk, which now left little room there for anything else, put two sheets into the typewriter and typed “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid or something.” The typewriter didn’t have good keyboard action. It needed a cleaning, maybe a complete overhaul. The print was English. Anyway, I didn’t feel like typing now.

I went into the alcove. Next to the toilet, which had one of those water tanks and pull-chains over it, was a tiny sink and counter. There was also what looked like a night table, with a single hot plate, saucepan and electric teakettle on it, and a cupboard with about six neatly stacked dishtowels, some cleaning supplies, an extra roll of toilet paper, two mugs, two saucers, two teaspoons and a butter knife and fork, a jar of instant expresso coffee, a box of teabags, an unopened tube of mayonnaise, three cans of tuna and one of mixed fruit.

It was a dismal place to write, I thought; depressing. The shabby furniture, old linoleum on the floor, stained walls that badly needed a paint job, and a view through that one window of an ugly much taller building about twenty feet across a yard. I didn’t care if Cochran wrote here all those years, I didn’t want to write in it. Though give it time, I thought; maybe I’d get used to the place. But even if I fixed it up, why would I want to write here? I have a nice apartment now, with a separate room, larger than this entire studio, just to write in. And both those rooms and the kitchenette and bathroom have a view of a small pretty park, and large double windows, except for the bathroom, you push out rather than pull up or down, as this one had.

I went downstairs. “I won’t be using these keys,” I said to the concierge. “I won’t be coming back. It was very kind of Mr. Cochran”—I said all this in French— “to give me his studio, and with the fees for maintenance taken care of for five years. But it is not a very good place for me to do my writing. It was without doubt good for Mr. Cochran, but I’m saying here, not for me. I am also very aware of the great honor Mr. Cochran made to me to have this room for writing forever, and very generous of him. If you see Mr. Cochran, please say to him what I said to you. And please, give my best wishes and deepest thanks to him.”

“He will be disappointed and sad you didn’t like his room,” the concierge said. “It was very special to him. He came to it almost every day and stayed in it for many hours and wrote masterpiece after masterpiece there. One could always hear his typewriter going click-click-click.”

“Please don’t say to him that I didn’t like the room. It wasn’t that. It’s a good place to write. Few distractions and very quiet, which is perfect for a writer. Maybe he’ll discharge himself from the nursing home he’s in and return to his room upstairs to write.”

“I don’t think he’ll be coming back to us. I also don’t think I’ll have the opportunity to tell him anything you’ve said.”

“He’s that sick?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. What should I do with the room now? You own it. I’ve seen the legal papers. You could sell it, if you wish, and make yourself a great deal of money. This is quickly becoming a very desirable neighborhood. The price for an apartment—just a single studio room, like yours—rises every day. And he has such an enormous reputation.”

“I really don’t think it’s mine to sell,” I said. “He gave it to me to write in, not to make money from it. So do what you want with it. Give it to another writer. Or hold it for Mr. Cochran in case his health improves and he does return, which is what I hope for.”

“I don’t know any other writers,” the concierge said.

“This city is filled with them, from many countries. Or the lawyer who handled the legal papers—he’ll know what to do. Mr. Cochran’s niece. She should probably get it. But I want nothing to do with it. I think that’s the honorable positon for me to take.”

I left the building, called my friend to see if he was interested in the studio, but his roommate said he suddenly had to fly home to Cape Town for a month. So maybe I should sell it, I thought. But it would be wrong and I didn’t want to be bothered, and I was satisfied with what I had now. The lawyer and concierge and Cochran’s niece will figure something out as to what to do with the studio. It wasn’t my concern, and maybe it was all a mistake. Cochran only met me for half an hour. It made no sense. Who knows? I thought. He could have been drunk when he signed the place over to me, or took me for someone else.

I was going to stop someplace for coffee. But I got an idea for a short story and went back to my apartment to write it. The story had nothing to do with the studio and wasn’t about my half-hour meeting with Cochran. It was mainly about how I met my wife more than ten years ago. It was in the lobby of an art movie house in New York. New Year’s Day, early afternoon. Probably means she’s single, I had thought, and unattached. We were waiting in line to get inside. She was in front of me, reading a book in French. She had a nice face and she looked intelligent and I liked that she was reading a thick book in French while waiting to see what’s supposed to be a fairly artful complex movie. I thought of what to say and then said “Excusez-moi, mademoiselle—okay, I’ll stop the pretending. My French is abominable. So excuse me again, I don’t mean to disturb you from your reading, but what’s the title of that book in English? It looks familiar.” She gave me the title in English. “Sure, now I know it,” I said, “and you’re American. An interesting writer. He’s from Scotland but has lived in France since the end of the Second World War, and is almost as well known for his short stories as he is his novels. And for many years now he only writes in French and translates all his works into English. Big in Europe but not so much in America or even Scotland.” “That’s right,” she said. “You may go to the head of the class now.” “I’m sorry. I guess I did sound a little pedantic, especially for someone who hasn’t read more than five pages of one of his books.” “No, no,” she said. “You know a lot more about him than most people do, which is a shame. He deserves a much wider audience here.” “May I ask if you’re reading it for scholarly reasons or for pleasure, or maybe both.” “Both,” she said. “So you’re going for a doctorate in French literature and Maitland Cochran’s one of the writers, or maybe the main one, you’re reading for your dissertation?” and she said “No, just for a course. Although for my dissertation I may end up writing about some aspect of his work. His poetry, even. More room there. And it’s every bit as good as his fiction, and none of it’s been published here or anyplace but France. I’ve time to decide yet.” “From everything I’ve heard from people who have read his fiction, and also from those couple of peeks of mine into a book or two of his myself—in English of course. I’d never think of reading him in French, though I do have some reading understanding of the language—I felt he can be a very difficult writer and a little too cerebral for me. Intentionally difficult, I’m saying, and too abstruse. Anything to that?” “To some people, perhaps,” she said, “but not to me. I find him very funny, in both languages, a great stylist, and once you get a few pages in to any of his books, easy to read and like nobody else and definitely worthwhile.” “Well,” I said, “the one you’re reading was once recommended to me in English long ago. Do you think it’s a good one to start off with?” “Oui,” she said, and laughed.