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| conversations with mr. prain
He did not seem to want to tell me anything about his present circumstances, personal or professional, as if they were too dull, and I did not press him for information. I never asked him his name. I would refer to him humorously as “Mr. E.” The mystery. He was, at any rate, very much a “Mr.” to me, in a way that English men can be, and Australasian or North American men generally cannot. It was to do with an innate reserve, confidence and bearing. Despite my teasing, and wish to demonstrate otherwise, his formal manner, age and wealth seemed to demand some recognition of my inferiority and social distance. I did not ask him what he did for a living. In my circles, you rarely asked what acquaintances worked at to earn money. You waited for them to provide information about their chosen artistic medium, after which you defined them vocationally as “Jack the dancer” or “Kishti the painter,” à la the Middle Ages. Paid work was never considered a vocation. Had I known at the outset that he was a prestigious and well-known publisher I would never have let myself compose a poem in front of his very eyes. It was late July, and tourists greatly outnumbered locals. The suffocating day pressed upon us. People were sweating odiously as they shuffled through the stall. I was too torpid to think straight, and spent most of my spare time fiddling with a poem that never seemed to improve no matter what I did to it. It was nevertheless a counterblast against the reeking sauna of my present conditions, since it recalled an icy morning in October,