The Late, Sort-Of Great, Georgy Riecke

[Guest author: Jean-Pierre Sertin. Footnotes by Doris Boshchov]

It’s been three months[1], I think, since Doris Boshchov asked me to write this memorial to her late husband Georgy Riecke. I would like to say that it took me all this time to get over my grief, but that would be dishonest[2] – and if there’s anything that Georgy disliked (there were a lot of things, in fact) it was dishonesty. So I’ll lay my cards down on the table: I’ve had other things on my mind. There was this story I was trying to write, for one, this poem I was struggling to finish, for two, and this play I never started but rather fancied was going to make me famous one day, for three.[3] There was other stuff besides, none of which I imagine you want to hear about it, this being neither the place nor the time for messy relationship stories that may or not involve a stricken feline.

The fact that I am now writing said memorial does not mean that said things have been resolved, merely that Doris’s patience has devolved, which is to say that it has broken into shards of frustration, not a few of which have been gathered together and pointed, like a fragmented dagger, in my direction. She has demanded that I knuckle down and do what I should have done several weeks ago, or risk the full force of her wrath, which I took to mean that she has every intention of writing a really nasty poem about me and publishing it in all the major literary journals in Finland.[4] This is the sort of demand, as you can imagine, that I take very seriously. No one likes to be dissed by a Scandinavian poetess.[5] That is the kind of thing that can destroy the sort of middling career I enjoy; or at the very least ensure that I will never ever be stood a drink at The Crippled Bee (the North London public house whose dedication to all things literary and Scandinavian will be very well-known to you, dear reader of mine).[6]

So: to task. You have probably heard by now that the late Georgy Riecke has left his seat in the back row of life’s theatre and stormed through the door marked ‘exit’. I forgot when he died, exactly. A Thursday back in April or May, I fancy.[7] It was definitely a Thursday because I was on the phone to my mother when I got the news – by e-mail no less (I’m not a fan of e-mail, which is why I only check my account once a week, while on the phone to my mother).[8] How did I react? Well, I can’t recall for sure, but I think it was with a mixture of surprise, amusement, disappointment, discomfort and relief. Relief, of course, because I owed Georgy not a little money, and I knew that Doris didn’t know this[9], and probably wouldn’t want it back in any case (whereas Georgy, bless him, had been badgering me about it for years). Discomfort, inevitably, because any death is a reminder of death’s existence, and no man wants to be reminded of that on a Thursday afternoon, no matter how boring the person on the other end of the phone. Disappointment, then, because Georgy, for all his faults, never failed to support me as a writer, against all the odds – and was, now I stop to consider it, the only real supporter I have ever had.[10] Amusement, however, because the guy died from falling out of a tree, which whatever way you look at it is such a Georgy-Riecke-way-to-die. And surprise, because although anyone could have predicted he would one day fall from a tree and cut his brain open – a few of the guys at the TCB had actually put bets on this being the method of his demise – no one expected it to happen so soon.[11]

I’d always presumed, indeed, that Georgy would live to be Very Old Indeed. I pictured him in his nineties, still pottering around in that tired brown blazer of his, looking every inch like the great literary critic he very clearly wasn’t.[12] He always had an air of ragged permanence about him, as if he stood apart from time. A lot of people tell me that Georgy was sensitive, and I certainly experienced this in person. In the long run, however, I wonder how a truly sensitive person could have dedicated his life, as Georgy Riecke did, to the pursuit of obscure European literature. If he had been truly sensitive, he would have backed horses that stood at least an outside chance of winning. He would have devoted himself to things that either a) mattered or b) were popular – instead of things that a) were largely pointless and b) weren’t much liked.[13] Was it just a case of having impeccably bad taste? Maybe so. Certainly Georgy had an ability to see promise where others saw only dross. His enemies liked to say that he sought difficulty for difficulty’s sake; that he was in love with the idea of obscure literature far more than the literature itself.[14] His championing of Yevgeny Nonik is a case in point. Who in their right mind would put so much energy into the inchoate ramblings of a Russian madman? Georgy, however, never gave it a second thought.[15] Either he was extremely farsighted, or he was irrevocably nuts. As one of many writers to benefit from his encouragement, I cannot comment on this, except to say that I would be not a little shocked to find future generations thinking of him as some sort of prophet. To put it another way, Georgy didn’t have bad taste – just very strange taste. He redefined taste, to what end we will never know.

Here’s the point where I should share some sort of anecdote. I spent many evenings drinking cheap wine and eating salty crackers with Georgy: surely I must have a crazy story or two up my sleeve? And yet, when I shake that sleeve, nothing appears to fall out – or nothing worth mentioning.[16] Mostly I talked about myself, and Georgy listened.[17] Occasionally someone else joined us, and tried to steer the conversation onto the subject of themselves. I usually left at this point. Georgy, I am told, would sometimes write about these conversations on his blog, of which I was (like most of his friends) a very occasional reader.[18]

Speaking of reading, this was of course the man’s serious passion – for better or worse. It is appropriate that he died reading (why else would he have been up a tree?) and not a little sad that no one ever recovered the book that was in his hands during that last moment. According to Doris, a magpie stole it from his hands while he was in the tree, which prompted the sudden movement, which prompted the fall.[19] Where is that magpie now? And, more to the point, did it have the good grace to read the book it stole? If so, how did it read that book? This is the kind of question that would have exercised Georgy. How does a bird read?[20] How does a text change when the reader wears a beak? For like his so-called mentor, the equally deranged Johannes Speyer, Georgy was a great believer in the instability of the text. If I knew what that meant, I would probably say more about it. As it is, I will draw to a close by listing some of things I will think of when I think of Georgy.

1. pineapple juice (for obvious reasons).[21]
2. the fact that, for all the millions of artists out there in the world, less than one percent of them will ever receive a third of the attention they deserve, and that this doesn’t bear thinking about, which is why for the most part I don’t, except when Georgy comes to mind, which is mercifully rare.[22]
3. the letter ‘G’, not just because that was the first letter of his name, but because he wrote that godawful book about books by authors whose name also began with the letter ‘G’, which was I think meant to make us think, about what I can’t remember, as I only read the foreword, and that many moons ago.[23]
4. his literary journal, ‘Underneath the Bunker’, which I appeared in several times, for which I am thankful, and which I otherwise never really read either, because to be quite frank with you I only really read things which I myself wrote. He had a blog as well, which I have already mentioned, and on which I think this memorial is going to be published, as a kind of ‘last post’ sort-of-thing
5. salty crackers (see above). Having just written this, I wonder now whether the salty crackers were always Georgy’s ‘thing’, or whether it was something he picked up from another of The Crippled Bee’s mildly deranged regulars. Must ask around about this.[24]
6. Johannes Speyer (again, for obvious reasons, not least that memoir Georgy wrote about him, which I have on good authority is not the very worst thing he wrote).[25]
7. his house in London, which he let me stay in many times, against his better judgement.[26]
8. his cottage in Vladivostok, which I never stayed in, and am not at all certain ever existed outside of his imagination.[27]
9. Aldous Egg, his evil nemesis, who again I don’t think existed, outside of GR’s over-active imagination.
10. his convoluted metaphors and similes, of which he was prouder than a robin with inadequacy issues who has just laid an egg the size of the grand canyon.
11. Last but not least, Germany, from which he apparently came, despite the complete lack of accent, and almost no understanding of German culture.[28] Word is he covers all of this in his memoir about Speyer, so if you’re interested in learning more, by all means head there. As for me, I’m done. Georgy Riecke, if not one of the greats, you were certainly among the greatest of those who would have liked to be great, given better breaks, more brain cells and, well, a greater degree of greatness. Enjoy the afterlife, old bean.

[1] Five and a half, actually.

[2] For the record: try as he might to hide his tears behind an embroidered Japanese handkerchief, it was clear to everyone present that Sertin wept copiously at Georgy’s funeral

[3] Georgy once said to me that there was no one in the world who had more creative ideas than J-P Sertin, and no one less likely to complete any of them, to which I would reply ‘why support him then, if he never gets anything done?’ to which he would shake his head and stare at the floor for several minutes.

[4] Sertin knows me better than I thought he did. Over the past few years I have been able to compose a whole suite of nasty poems about him, which I look forward to publishing after his death (or mine, should it come first).

[5] This is very true. See, for instance, the career of Antoine Rallarno post-1989.

[6] If anyone reading this can name an instance in which J-P Sertin bought his own drink – or anyone else’s for that matter – I would love to hear of it.

[7] February 4^th, in fact. And it was a Monday.

[8] I tried to phone Sertin eighteen times (leaving at least four messages on his answerphone) before breaking the news to him via an e-mail.

[9] Of course I knew this and, au contraire, I would very much like it back, Georgy having hardly departed this earth in a state of financial hunky-dory.

[10] Were it not for the fact that Georgy, in all his complexity, would probably have loved this self-serving joke for a memorial text, I would dearly love to have cut every line but this one.

[11] Funny: I always thought he would drown, notoriously bad swimmer that he was.

[12] I take it back: I like parts of this line also, though I wish Sertin had said more about the blazer, which had lived more lives than most.

[13] I am determined not to take this line personally.

[14] It is not exactly fair to say that Georgy had enemies – the mysterious Aldous Egg aside. His work was met with either grudging praise or silence, mostly the latter.

[15] Not true: he did once ask my advice re: Nonik. I can’t remember what I said exactly, but clearly it wasn’t strong enough to put him off the project (which, incidentally, is one I have come to value, in unexpected ways).

[16] This, as Sertin knows well, is sheer laziness on his part. I suspect that he is saving up his best Georgy anecdotes for yet another book which he will never finish.

[17] This, however, is quite true.

[18] This may also, sadly, be true. Few of Georgy’s friends read his writing, whether printed or published online, usually citing that well-known excuse ‘I never quite got around to it’. I confess that there are bits and pieces that even I have not read. He wrote a lot, after all, and not all of it was tip-top quality. As for whether he expected, or would have liked, more readers, all I can say is that he checked his website stats relatively regularly, and once claimed that there was ‘nothing sadder in the world than reader statistics’. I once asked a friend to give her honest opinion of the readership of Underneath the Bunker. She replied that all the signs pointed towards it being one of the least well-read journals in the history of time, which was saying a lot.

[19] I have no idea where Sertin got this information from. Georgy’s fall was not prompted by a thieving magpie. He merely slipped (which is what happens when a man in his late fifties tries to climb a tree in flip-flops after a storm). As for the book he took into the tree, I have good reason to suppose that it is still up there, and no intention to ever recover it myself.

[20] I doubt this question ever occurred to Georgy. Speyer, maybe, but that is a different story.

[21] Those reasons being Georgy’s investigations into the hallucinatory power of pineapple juice, the results of which he published online.

[22] No comment.

[23] That book has no foreword. Perhaps he means the acknowledgements?

[24] The salty crackers have nothing to do with Georgy. They are simply something The Crippled Bee has insisted on serving to all its customers, for free, for several decades now, as a means of cultivating their thirst. There is a long-standing rumour that said crackers are imported from Eastern Europe, but I know for a fact that one of the barmen buys them in bulk from the local supermarket, and that they are a cheap American brand. Georgy ate them absent-mindedly, like he ate most food.

[25] I think it is probably the best thing he wrote. Again, Sertin’s vagueness is misleading: in fact, he edited a good portion of the Speyer memoir, and discussed the text in great detail with Georgy.

[26] As discussed here, for instance. Or here.

[27] I haven’t the patience to continue correcting all errors of fact, but this is such a ridiculous assertion, really it is.

[28] See previous note. Note also the lack of note following point 9.