A Life in Pieces

By Christopher Robinson

Young Bartholomew, just out of university, finds himself charged with the task of going out to Thailand to sort and possibly edit and publish the papers of his dead grandfather, Ta. Whilst he knew that his Ta was gay, Bart is initially a little shocked by the material he finds. He becomes caught up in the task of piecing together the man who wrote them and begins to ask himself new questions about how we perceive and understand ourselves.

Bart decides to publish the book about his grandfather’s journey growing up as a closeted gay boy in 1950’s and 1960’s England. It follows his journey in finding other possible selves both in the very different society of Greece in the 60’s and in the transformative possibilities of amateur acting. And after getting lost in the stifling atmosphere of an academic career and trying, through marriage and fatherhood, to mould himself into a ‘self’ which he could not maintain, Ta ostensibly finds release and a new sense of possibilities in Thailand. But was the new self any less fictive than earlier ones?

In A Life in Pieces follow Bart and his grandfather, Ta, as they journey to find their true selves and understand their identities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805147022

Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson, a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and McSweeney’s.

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Copyright © 2023 Christopher Robinson

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Ta and Tan (2010)

Author’s Note

Since I was a small child, I have always been aware of myself from the outside, as a character in a novel over whose plot I had no control. What is more, though I obviously have some grasp of its linear development, I can only remember the detail of my existence in disjointed fragments. If my life is interesting at all, it is in terms of why and how things happened, not of when and what, and the problems of how to write and read that life are at least as interesting as the life itself. That is why, rather than attempt to write a conventional autobiography, I have tried to rediscover myself through what the French would, I suppose, call autofiction. Though the narrative framework of this text is clearly fictional, the characters and events at its heart are ‘real’. It is the best way I could find to explore my past and try to understand myself. To create the patina of fiction many names of people and places are lightly changed, but not all. The dramatis personae are in any case easily recognizable by anyone who knows them. And absence from the text does not mean lack of importance to me, especially in the context of my sexuality. Indeed, some gentlemen in England now abed should probably consider themselves thrice blessed they are not here. I have confined myself to memories and events which haunt me for reasons I cannot determine, and they in turn have imposed the cast list.

I dedicate the work to Carole, my daughter Patience, my granddaughters Imogen and Genevieve and especially my grandson Natty (who must forgive me for the avatar which I have projected onto him), my close friends (they know who they are, but I should salute Charles, Steve, Dimitris, Marj and Rachel in particular) and above all to Tan and the memory of Doni, the one man who loved me as much as I loved him.

Contents

Part One

Bart’s Story (1)

(i) An unexpected invitation

(ii) The three boxes

Part Two

The Manuscript (1)

(1): The Project

Part Three

The Manuscript (2): Ta’s Stories

(i) Fear of flying

(ii) Relatively speaking

(iii) Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

(iv) Why hast thou forsaken me?

(v) The interview

(vi) Room at the top

(vii) People like us

(viii) Changing places

(ix) The coming-out dance

(x) Going out with a bang

(xi) The blue-eyed boy

(xii) A slap in the face

(xiii) The greatest of these is Charity

(xiv) Worlds apart

(xv) The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

(xvi) The vigil

(xvii) The cardboard man

(xviii) They have their exits and their entrances

(xix) The change of life

Part Four

Bart’s Story (2)

(i) Addenda

(ii) Mr Beautiful

(iii) A plain tale from the hills

Epilogue

Part One

Bart’s Story (1)

(i) An unexpected invitation

Quite when or how my interest in my maternal grandfather began I cannot remember. As he died abroad when I was six or so, my memories of him are only shadows and doubtful glimpses, images perhaps implanted by later narratives rather than genuinely rooted in the experience of his presence. By my mother’s account he had only visited us a handful of times, though I had apparently grown quite attached to him on the second occasion and after his departure (I was only about two years old) would earnestly seek out elderly gentlemen of roughly the right colouring and dimensions in the park where we played, to check whether they might be my inexplicably vanished relative. Later there were still one or two photographs of him around the house, a few more tucked away in albums and the odd relic of his visits – notably the circular Thai carving of a village scene which hung in the spare bedroom and the two wooden Buddhas which, with (as I later perceived it) characteristic perversity, he had given to my sister and me on the occasion of our baptism. With them was kept a short note in his own scrawly writing, expressing the hope that we would take the trouble to find out about Buddhism when we got older. On any other level he was rapidly and completely eclipsed by the continued existence of my grandmother – his estranged wife, known to us as Ya – and my father’s parents. All three of them were solid, reliable, predictable presences – very solid in the case of Ya; unchanging sites of welcome, comfort and reward. My twin sister, who has a much more down-to-earth temperament than I, certainly never showed as much interest as I did in the perennially absent Ta – that is what we called him – even before his death, and after it she always manifested a marked preference for her two grandmothers over her surviving grandfather. But I, at least according to my mother, was occasionally to be found gazing thoughtfully at Ta’s photographs or dreamily clutching one of the Buddhas. Presumably some faint aroma of his persona simply stayed with me. Or perhaps it was his very unattainability, the suggestion of elsewhere which his mere name evoked, that fascinated me even as a small child.

On reflection, photographs are curiously misleading, aren’t they? They fix a moment, or rather a single slant on a moment, and translate it into the totality of an event, a person, a place. The handful of photos of Ta to which I had access as a child and adolescent were all taken relatively late in life and showed him as a benign old gentleman, usually in repose, sharp-eyed but apparently at ease with himself. Later, as will emerge from my narrative, I had access to a wealth of other images. But though they added new dimensions to my perception of his character – he could look resigned, sad, tense, distracted, harrowed even – they were still always images governed by the intentions of the photographer and the atmosphere of the context in which they were taken. However, for the moment, you must accept that my memory of Ta, indeed my fascination with Ta, was at least in part formed, as well as preserved, by those few portraits of twinkling but rather passive good humour.

Fascination there was, then, but of that fluid, evanescent sort which comes in fits, like a heavy scent on a willful breeze, and fades into nothing on an instant. The busy life of a small boy leaves little room for the cultivation of such whimsical attachments, and the more fraught passage of adolescence still less. By the time I reached student age I knew no more about him than I had at the age of five. Well, perhaps a little more. I knew that he had been one of my father’s tutors at the Oxford college where, strictly against my mother’s wishes, I went to read English. I knew that when he retired, he had taken himself off to South-East Asia, only reappearing very intermittently and even contriving to miss his own mother’s funeral. And I knew that he was gay. I suppose that the last of these should have come as a shock, but I grew up so accustomed to the idea that some of my parents’ friends – not to mention my maternal uncle – were in ostensibly marital relations with members of their own sex that by the time it might have struck me as odd, not to say illogical, that one’s own grandfather might at some stage of his life have belonged to this select group, the fact of his gayness was simply a given, like the round, smiling face and the piercing blue eyes in the oil painting which, now I come to think of it, lingered in an upstairs passageway of Ya’s house.

The settled familiarity of all this was jarred, if indeed its weft was not quite unpicked, by the letter. It came one morning shortly after Finals: a common blue airmail envelope with a fairly nondescript stamp featuring some monarch or president, addressed, in an unfamiliar hand, to Bartholomew Langlois esq. It was not a form of address to which I was accustomed, yet I found it somehow pleasurable. It gave me an odd feeling of acquired substance. Yet, though it was an innocent-looking missive, the very fact of its existence, unbidden and unexplained, carried a hint of potential menace. Gingerly I put it down beside my cereal bowl and reached for the jug of soya milk.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ prompted my sister, her curiosity evidently outstripping her normal sense of discretion where my private life is concerned.

‘Don’t be an ass, Bea,’ I said. ‘Of course I’m going to open it. But as I have no idea who it’s from or why it’s come, I prefer to digest my oat flakes in comfortable ignorance first.’

With that look of complacent superiority which she always adopts when she knows that she is one step ahead of me, Beatrice flipped the envelope over and pointed to the flap.

‘You do know who it’s from. Or at least you could know if you bothered to look.’ She of course had picked the letter up from the mat and brought it into the kitchen, so she knew that an address was written on the back. I should have guessed!

‘Nathan’ proclaimed the envelope. Then an impenetrable surname, above a rather complicated address in Thailand. Nathan. Even the Christian name meant nothing to me. In any case, any of my contemporaries off on their travels would have sent an email, or at most a postcard. I was tempted to start on the letter at once but, reluctant to concede victory to my sister, left it until the last crumbs of toast and marmalade were safely ingested.

At first sight it was less a letter than an extended note, neatly typed and to the point. Yet at the same time it was much more than a letter too. For it was to determine, at least in the short run, what I would do next in life.

Dear Bartholomew,

This letter will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but one with which I assume you must now be old enough to cope. Before your grandfather – I believe you know him as Ta, which is a charming Thaïcism – passed away (goodness, he would have rapped me over the knuckles for a cliché of that sort), he left some stuff, principally two large boxes of assorted papers, books etc., with an instruction to pass it all on to you when you were of an age to make something of it. By my calculation you must be around twenty-one now, so I feel that the time has come to acquit myself of my duty. It would mean a trip out here – I live in the hills to the north of Chiang Mai – but he left the equivalent in baht of a couple of thousand pounds for your expenses, which I have kept in a savings account for you. The money is still worth pretty much what it was sixteen years ago. So you should only have to find the airfare out for yourself. You will in any case be assured of my hospitality for as long as you wish. Please give me a fortnight’s notice of your arrival. I look forward with undiluted pleasure to entertaining my old friend’s grandson.

Under the scrawled signature, in which I could still only make out the first name, was a postscript almost as long as the note and at least as informative.

PS. Perhaps I should set your mind at rest on one thing. I was not one of your grandfather’s boys. When we first met, I was too old by a decade, the wrong race and my tastes do not run in that direction. We just got on well together, an affinity rare enough in the hothouse of ex-pat relations. I dare say you are more laid-back about these things than my generation, let alone your grandfather’s. But perhaps your parents will be relieved to know that their cherished son is not being lured to the East for foul purposes.

There followed an address and telephone number and directions for reaching the place from Chiang Mai. The letter was both entirely clear and entirely opaque. Clear in that it set out the basic facts of the case with admirable brevity; opaque in that it gave no hint of the why behind my grandfather’s belated bequest. What were the papers in the boxes? Why had he left them to me? Why were they only to be yielded up after fifteen years or so had passed? Why, for that matter, had he chosen this shadowy Nathan as his intermediary?

I could not but raise a smile at the thought of my mother offering the slightest opposition to my zipping off into the depths of terra incognita in pursuit of this mysterious inheritance. It was common knowledge that at the age of eighteen she had travelled all around the Middle East as a sort of reincarnated Lady Hester Stanhope on a one-woman fact-finding tour which ignored all the conventions of safety and self-preservation. If I could not keep myself out of the embraces of one ageing ex-pat (and it seemed that there were not likely to be any embraces) she would regard it as my own silly fault. If eyebrows were to be raised, they would be my father’s. And even he would probably only mutter about injections, clean sheets and the unavailability of decent claret. Don’t get me wrong. No one keeps a closer eye on the wellbeing of their precious offspring than my parents. But they also have a well-judged sense of how and when to encourage independence.

‘Well?’ asked Bea, bristling with curiosity. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Buried treasure!’ I returned with a smirk and stuffed the letter into my pocket. Go I would. But I wanted time to think about the contents of the letter before I opened it up to general scrutiny.

It may seem odd that to someone of my age a journey to Thailand should still carry the promise of penetration into a dark unknown. It must be thirty years since Alex Garland wrote The Beach, and the days when sex and drugs on a South-East Asian beach were a rite of passage for every self-respecting middle-class Western adolescent have long gone, to be replaced by sedate family visits to Thai resorts which have thoroughly sanitized the country’s image. But despite my mother’s youthful adventurousness, we were a Jamesian family. The stones of Venice and the castles of the Rhine, gastronomic tours of Burgundy and home-stays in Sienna, these were what sated our adolescent yearnings for the elsewhere. Bea did once rebel and insisted on going inter-railing with her closest female friend. But since they settled for a cultural visit to the capitals of the old (now the new) Baltic states, it was ‘more of the same’, really. We were brought up, for perfectly good cultural reasons, to be Eurocentric, and that was that. Documentaries on Nepal and Bhutan had set me dreaming, admittedly, but in a certain sense they contrived to seem like an exoticised version of Switzerland or Austria, so ruthlessly has organised tourism reshaped the world into a series of recognisable, easily digested forms. The global zoo, neatly labelled cages which contain an otherness you can see but not touch. And which, more to the point, cannot touch you. There was a chap in my year at college who went on a three-week ‘jungle safari’ in Laos and Cambodia. When I asked him if he enjoyed it, he complained that the animal noises kept him awake at night and that you could only get local beer. I think he was expecting to be ferried around in a soundproofed Perspex bubble and served with meat pies and real ale. I am not like that, and neither, I hasten to add, are my parents, let alone my sister. When in Archangel, do as the angels. Which is precisely why the prospect of a trip to Chiang Mai had the power both to excite me and to daunt me a tad. But go I would. Go I must. For this was not just some foreign holiday. It was to be a voyage into the past, my grandfather’s past, and so in some indefinable sense a voyage into myself.

Looking back at what I have written so far, I can see that it begs more questions than it answers. I once told my uncle’s partner, the novelist Jay Aram incidentally, that I wanted to write but I did not know where to start. ‘Start wherever your fancy takes you,’ he said, ‘and just keep writing until you run out of breath. It doesn’t matter if you seem to be going in circles or making random leaps. You can go back over it, decide what you want to keep, what to jettison, what gaps to fill, how to rearrange.’ Going where the fancy takes me is, I suppose, exactly what I have been doing so far. Letting my pen run, the way my tongue often does. Now I should be thinking about shaping it all, giving it a direction. But I do not think I shall be able to make my readers make sense of this ‘voyage around my grandfather’, let alone of whatever it might reveal about myself, unless I fill in the picture of my family a little. At the moment it is as if we are all there but hiding in the shadows. Or rather we are in penciled outline only. A portrait with six figures: the silhouettes of my parents seated comfortably in the middle, their shapes fully delineated but without features, Bea and I cross-legged in front of them, with just a hint of colour to give us substance, and standing behind my parents the spectral presence of Ta and Ya, spaces defined only as ellipses in the background, which is itself barely more than a few crude brushstrokes. Good portraits are representations of an artist’s perceptions of his subject (think of Goya and the dogs). Poor portraits, on the other hand, are merely agreeable surface compositions, patterns of colour and shape, which at best reflect the superficial images which the sitters wish to present. The artist, neither knowing nor caring to know them more deeply, has limited himself to the obvious. I think I can do better than that. After all, I know my sitters far more deeply than any painter is likely to know his, unless perhaps he is painting a lover. But you will have to be patient with me.

I suppose I should start with my sister. She is after all my twin. Although we do not have that symbiotic closeness which makes identical twins so disturbing, we are inevitably much closer than mere brother and sister. I have never been able to fathom the logic behind our names. If she is Beatrice, I should be Benedict. Or if I am Bartholomew, she should be Rebecca or Naomi or something solidly OT of that sort. I know that if I questioned my mother, she would say something like: ‘So do you have a problem with your names? Because if not, it’s not a topic worth pursuing’, whereas my father would look vague and say something really odd and quite tangential, like: ‘You see, they had to be names that aren’t in Wagner’, as though that had been a real danger. Perhaps it had. Tristan and Brunnhilde. Makes your blood run chill for a moment. Frankly, I sometimes think that Bea is in great danger of turning out to be Brunnhilde, but at least she doesn’t have the name to encourage her. Anyway, getting back to the point, my guess is that they simply chose one each, but who chose which I shall never know. Odd names do of course run in my mother’s side of the family, it is true. My mother’s elder sister, who is a midwife in Polynesia (honestly) and mother of my cousin Finn, was apparently registered as Hephzibah Loveday, though she is only ever referred to as Aunt Holly. I asked my uncle (I didn’t dare ask Mum) if that was a reference to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but he just gave me a wry look and said that any resemblance between my aunt and Audrey Hepburn was entirely accidental. A typically oblique comeback, since he knew perfectly well that I was asking about the character in the book, not the actress playing her. Though of course my uncle is a film critic; he writes for one of the Sunday papers. I did once ask Ya – about our names, not Aunt Holly’s – but she had one of her flights of fancy and said that from the moment of birth we were two busy little bees and so we had to have names beginning with B. As Bea said, on that principle they might just as well have called us Bed and Breakfast, since I like sleeping and she’s a voracious eater. But the other thing Ya said did stick in my mind. ‘Of course, Ta wanted them to call you Seth or Caleb. He wanted to call your uncle Mark Seth too, but I wouldn’t let him. No son of his could ever have been a Seth. All that lechery and undone fly-buttons.’ As I was about twelve at the time, I had no clear idea what lechery was (though I had a nasty suspicion) and absolutely no desire to discuss undone fly-buttons with my grandmother. Now I wish I had done. Because I would dearly like to know why Ta wanted to call me Seth or Caleb. And what he would have liked to call Bea.

One thing you will certainly have noticed already. I have a marked tendency to wander off down side paths. The slightest thing distracts me. No, what distracts me is not things at all, but words. Apparently, I have always had a very physical fascination with words. Other, well-targeted babies like my sister were busy learning to say ‘mummy, daddy, milk, biscuit’, or in Bea’s case ‘mama, dada, Batty (that’s me), Burgundy, sparrowgrass’ (not a bad go at asparagus for a twenty-month-old; she was a gourmet in the making from her first intake of solids, or so my father says). Young Bart went for the voluptuous words you could really roll around your mouth, pouch in your cheeks and slip under your tongue. Gargantuan, herbivore, ambidextrous. My parents and their friends were word people and their conversation bristled with the most delicious polysyllabic delights. The fact that my father was a Germanist widened the possibilities spectacularly. By the age of three I could roar Schadenfreude, Weltanschauung and Gotterdammerung with the best of them. Not that I had the slightest idea of what any of them meant. Indeed, I was thought to be vaguely of the opinion that they were polite forms of greeting, and certainly outraged my paternal grandmother by addressing her with the last on the list, which she misheard as a strongly irreligious oath. No, I loved them because they were fully fleshed, fruity, heady, chewy entities which I could savour endlessly in my hot little mouth. By the time I was five I had the entire vocabulary of mediaeval chivalry at my fingertips – well, tongue-tip – though this time I did know what the words meant: esquire, destrier, caparisoned. Not surprisingly I was a dreamer. At my fifth birthday party I recited the whole of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ by heart to a bemused and indifferent gathering of fellow five-year-olds. ‘Alone and palely loitering’. Delicious. I wouldn’t have swapped that line for any number of bowls of fruit jelly or slices of birthday cake. The grown-ups, of course, appeared to enjoy my performance. Admittedly, my mother rolled her eyes, but she was not entirely without maternal pride, and Ya beamed and my father muttered something in German and nodded approvingly.

I say that I was a dreamer, but this was not at the expense of the ordinary activities of boyhood. I could belt a hockey ball with the best of them. Still can. It helped that Bea is an ace with a ball of any size, so that I had a willing partner to practise with. My mother had been a good all-round sportswoman in her youth. She even swam for the Oxford City Youth team. Bea takes after her, though in other respects, not least her culinary skills, she is definitely my father’s offspring. While I was learning the Keats, she was probably knocking up a tray of spiced mango smoothies and assorted Vietnamese spring rolls for the party. They would have gone down a lot better with the assembled kittenage than yours-truly’s offering. Somehow, I managed to drift along in my double world, a perfectly competent little hearty with an odd taste in language. I think that being a twin was actually seen as the justification for a certain eccentricity, especially if your other half was as robustly self-sufficient as Bea.

Somehow bits and bobs about my mother seem to keep drifting into the text. A strong character, my mother. Perhaps she doesn’t really need explaining or even delineating. She colours everything she touches with her feelings and values. But just when you think she’s going to overpower you once and for all, she melts away in a puff of smoke. My father is much more obviously elusive. But don’t let that mislead you. He’s a strong character in his own way too. He’s rather older than she is and definitely an academic. Let him get his nose into a book in the pursuit of the solution to some problem or other, and you’ll have lost him for hours, if you’re not careful. He can get just as passionate as she can, but his energies are usually directed at something more ethereal, such as classical music or liturgical reform, whereas she’ll be busy saving a near-extinct species of butterfly or protecting the rights of immigrant Eskimos. But he’s always been a very hands-on father and he’s fantastically adept at cooking and do-it-yourself jobs. When I see the hearty, beer-swilling couch potatoes who most of my schoolmates seem to be afflicted with, I know that in my previous incarnation I must have done something right.¹

Has that got us any further? Possibly not, but at least I feel I have filled in the canvas a bit. Predictably, my parents were very supportive about my undertaking the Thai trip. So was Bea, for all that I detected a faint gleam of envy. I have to admit that I couldn’t wish for a better sister. She even borrowed a Lonely Planet guide off an old friend for me. The one person who was a shade lukewarm was Ya. But I suppose she had the most reason to nurture a few negative feelings about Ta’s life in his adopted country. And she did not in any way try to come between me and the project. Indeed, she made it plain that her visits to Thailand had made her very fond of the place. It was more a certain cynicism about the nature and value of whatever it was that this Nathan had been hoarding for so long. ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather had a terrible habit of hanging on to every scrap of paper that came his way. There probably won’t be anything of interest at all.’

(ii) The three boxes

I won’t bore you with details of the preparation for the trip. And I certainly don’t intend to give you a blow-by-blow account of the flight. Long-haul flights are virtuoso exercises in the suppression of boredom, and though a certain amount of wry humour could probably be extracted from portraying one’s fellow passengers (not to mention the cabin crew, whom I privately christened Countess Dracula and her Daisy Chain), it is difficult to see how you can avoid reducing them to a series of clichéd types, especially when their destination is a place like Thailand. The internal flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was actually more promising but, exhausted, I was asleep for most of it, so all I really remember is the dark mauve décor and the singsong announcements (Thai air hostesses seem not to have realised that English is not a tonal language). The journey went perfectly smoothly. My mother had shown me how to get my luggage down to the essentials, which were then duly stowed in a largish rucksack. At the last moment she produced a couple of slim books to go in the shoulder bag which was my sole hand luggage (no lap-top, Mum had said firmly) and whose contents thus far had carefully been restricted to the obvious, i.e. my wash bag, minus the scissors, and my camera. Bea, bless her heart, had produced a spare lithium battery for the latter, saying – and she proved absolutely right – that I’d probably be hard put to find one where I was going. ‘If we couldn’t find one in Vilnius, you haven’t a hope of finding one in Chiang Thingummy.’ (She knew perfectly well where I was going, but I think she was mildly put out not to be included in the jaunt, so she affected to forget the details.) Anyway, as I was saying, Mum came up with these two books. ‘You’d better read these on your way out,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather based them on his life in Thailand, so they must have some relevance to whatever it is you think you’re going to find there.’

The only works of my grandfather’s that I had ever seen around the house were academic volumes shelved with my father’s books in his study. These two, in contrast, were apparently fiction. Let’s Do It: Stories of Thai Life, the title of one proclaimed. Borderlines: More Stories of Thai Life, said the other. They had white covers, one with a rainbow-coloured butterfly, the other a folded length of rainbow-coloured silk. Nicely understated.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said. ‘What are they about?’

‘You’ll see,’ she said flatly.

As it turned out, they were a godsend, in-flight entertainment being a form of torture Torquemada would have been proud to invent. More than that, they provided me with a perspective, however slight, on Nathan, who turned up by name as a character in two or three tales. Otherwise, I hardly knew what to make of them. They were all about sex between men, principally in the form of male prostitution. No, that’s a wild oversimplification. But most of the young male characters seemed to have no qualms about using their bodies to material advantage. I suppose that’s the point. Things we make a meal of in Western morality are simply irrelevant according to other codes. The stories are really about the absurdity of our moral assumptions and