By Avee Chaudhuri.
Richard Varma, the illustrator, draftsman, and muralist, died of natural causes earlier this year in Wichita, Kansas. Varma is perhaps most notable for his collaborations with Sirin Volokhonsky, better known as Professor Metzinger, the children’s author whose bizarre public appearances often overshadowed the sad, whimsical lyricism of his work. They began their collaboration in the early 1960s. The whereabouts of Metzinger’s final manuscript were unknown to most for nearly a quarter of a century. A malevolent rumor persisted that it was destroyed along with its author in a Hungarian prison riot. Others buoyantly claimed that Metzinger had managed to smuggle it away via a sympathetic guard, moments before his death, like in a Hollywood melodrama. But Varma’s own passing has revealed a mundane, yet pleasant, truth. The manuscript for Quincy the Calvinist Turtle, Metzinger’s last known piece of writing, was sent to Varma a few weeks before Metzinger’s death.
As the sole beneficiary of Metzinger’s literary estate, it was Varma’s right to withhold Quincy from the world. In turn, his surviving family members have chosen to sell the manuscript and accompanying correspondence to the highest bidder, hence its publication in this venerable review. While Varma’s actions may seem heartless to the reading public, it is our belief, having examined the manuscript, that he was attempting to preserve Metzinger’s reputation as a humane, hopeful, energetic genius. What follows is crude and rather upsetting and unsparing in places, though Metzinger’s notes to Varma give us greater insight into Metzinger’s troubled and deeply damaged psyche. More importantly, these marginalia reaffirm the enduring nature of an important literary and artistic partnership. Admirers of Metzinger and Varma doubtlessly recognize the brilliant color photograph on the page opposite. In all likelihood they have noticed it before on scores of dust jackets: the slender, elegant Varma in his three-piece suit, the disheveled Metzinger shirtless in dungarees, the pair of them lounging on the balcony of The Rock Hotel, Gibraltar, as they watch naval exercises and drink Spanish wine. —The Editors
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Dear Ricky,
Joey the Circus Bear Visits Angola Prison was an unmitigated financial and critical failure, because its coda has been widely misconstrued as anti-Black and advocating for a separation of the races. You were right to have reservations and I should have listened to you. I regret most of the things I said when we met in New York. I certainly regret trying to capsize our swan boat on Central Park Lake, and I apologize for my theatrics. It was a natural consequence borne of consuming too much bourbon and diazepam. Those were lost, feral months.
I’ve refused to comment publicly on the matter but I’ll say this: Joey’s desire for Black Americans to leave the U.S. in a kind of mass exodus and resettle in an unspoiled paradise such as Patagonia is completely ingenuous. Denouncing the thinking of a dumb, innocent, fictional animal strikes me as idiotic, especially when Joey is so singularly unversed in world events and therefore approaches them with the boundless optimism of a child. Still, I reluctantly admit that Joey’s naiveté does come across as insensitive. Reports that Joey has been adopted as a mascot of the white supremacist movement has been extremely upsetting. Again, I apologize for dismissing your concerns about that particular manuscript.
I’m afraid there’s more bad news to report. I am writing to you, once again, from a prison cell. I’m in Budapest. Following my arrival from Istanbul, I was detained by Customs and they found pills in my luggage and on my person, quite a number of pills. They think—and it’s ludicrous—but they think I’m a drug runner and this has of course affected my sentencing and will prolong my time in prison. Policemen have such impoverished imaginations they cannot possibly fathom that all those narcotics were for my own personal use. As you know, I suffer from a condition which the French call ennui du renard constipé, a kind of malaise brought on by middle age and moral idiocy. I have neither the inclination nor business acumen to sell drugs to anyone.
This place lacks all manner of refinement. It’s not like when they stuck Napoleon on that resort island after Waterloo. There is no sommelier. I have no mistresses to plow in lieu of the elegant Empress Josephine, who wants nothing to do with me. The more I think about Napoleon, the angrier I get. Below, you’ll find a new manuscript. I want to be absolutely clear: I did not write this hastily in blood or under duress. It is not a product of my imprisonment. I wrote it placidly hungover on a beach, I think, or in a café, or in the apartment of a waitress or a chorus girl. It is not a reflection of my hunger or my despair.
If you want nothing to do with me after Angola, I understand. But I hope you will agree to continue our work together. After all, you are my one remaining link to the American Midwest, its dry and rippling fields of wheat, its parlous bodies of water, and that genial twilight which ends a long summer day in the southern marches of Kansas. If I say “blue,” you’ll understand precisely what I mean, because despite all these years apart we still have the same synesthesia.
A brief note on the manuscript: I use the term Calvinist loosely, and perhaps incorrectly. I realize this but I don’t care. I enjoy the alliteration.
Quincy the Calvinist Turtle lives with Mr. and Mrs. Fontenot. He has a pen to himself in the backyard and gets to eat all the delicious snails and plants his heart desires. The Fontenots are very kind to Quincy and they spend hours in the backyard, reading to Quincy and telling him news of the world.
The Fontenots should be middle-aged. The husband should have a nice little paunch from whiskey and fried haddock as well as a ship captain’s beard. The wife should be a brunette, with a comely figure, attractive enough to create an unfamiliar, wild stirring in our young male readers. Think of how Jocasta must have looked to Oedipus. Quincy’s pen will have a lot of vegetation and it should be caged in from the top, with an obvious latch and a lock on it. This will be critical later in the story.
In the afternoons, Quincy and Mr. Fontenot listen to opera on the radio.
Show the man sitting in a lawn chair beside the turtle pen, listening to a transistor radio, with a glass containing a substantial amount of whiskey and ice resting on his gut. And a giant lemon wedge transfixed on the rim of the glass. God, I miss whiskey. Have an issue of Playboy or Club International in his lap, with the centerfold out. As you might imagine, pornography is scarce here and likely not worth the cigarettes or safety razors. I assume there is an active prison economy in this place, though without speaking Hungarian I really don’t have the means to comprehend its nuances.
Quincy’s best friend is a rabbit named Pablo Honeydew.
Pablo Honeydew should be dressed like a clairvoyant pimp: half-cape, walking stick, and a disheveled top hat, of course. He should be introduced offering Quincy some nice carrots.
Quincy and Pablo Honeydew enjoy playing cards and talking about baseball.
Pablo Honeydew is perched on top of the cage, and they are playing five-card stud and using acorns as poker chips, or something charming and rustic like that. Otherwise, the scene should be very extravagant. Quincy should be in a dinner jacket eating escargot, even holding the appropriate fork for it. Pablo Honeydew drinks carrot juice from a martini glass.
Quincy the Calvinist Turtle seems to have an ideal life, but all is not well, dear reader. You see, Quincy is being fatted by the Fontenots in order to make turtle soup!
Show the cage in the foreground, with Quincy munching on plants happily, and in the background have a window into the kitchen which frames a shirtless Mr. Fontenot eagerly reading a book entitled How to Cook Turtles: 1,001 Delicious Recipes. Mrs. Fontenot should be reading over her husband’s sinewy shoulder, drinking red wine with a pleased curl to her lips, like Liz Taylor. She should remain heavily eroticized. Perhaps it is nighttime and she is wearing a sheer sleeping gown.
One day, while stealing carrots from the Fontenots’ pantry, Pablo Honeydew overhears Mr. and Mrs. Fontenot talking.
“Aren’t you excited, my dear, about turtle soup?” asks Mrs. Fontenot.
“Indeed I am, my darling. Quincy should be good and ready in a day or two,” says Mr. Fontenot.
The Fontenots should be discussing this casually at the kitchen table, while eating bran muffins and drinking coffee. I guess Pablo Honeydew would be under the table. I’m not entirely sure. I trust you to handle the visual logic of this tableau. I refuse to micromanage you in your art, just as you have allowed me to make my own questionable decisions.
When the Fontenots have gone to town for a party, Pablo Honeydew rushes to warn Quincy.
“Quincy, the Fontenots are preparing to make you into soup. We have to get you out of here, pronto! I heard it when I was stealing carrots!” exclaims Pablo Honeydew. He is worried about his best friend.
“Pablo, that seems absurd to me, and even if it’s true, then that is the fate God has chosen for me,” calmly replies Quincy the Calvinist Turtle.
“Are you telling me you’re just going to sit there and let them make you into soup!” shouts Pablo Honeydew.
“God has willed it,” says Quincy.
“But hasn’t God willed me discovering their plan? Hasn’t God willed this moment right now when you can escape?” asks Pablo Honeydew.
“Pablo, my friend, I am one of the elect. I know this by my actions. I am a dutiful turtle. It would not be prudent or dutiful to trust the word of a known thief,” says Quincy.
“I’m trying to save your life!” Pablo Honeydew yells.
“You get out of here!” Quincy shouts back.
This conversation should take place over several pages, with the looks on the turtle’s and rabbit’s faces changing where appropriate, from resignation to indignation, from anguish to bewilderment to rage.
After he’s chased away his best friend, Quincy prays to God, asking God to forgive him for losing his temper and asking for his friend Pablo Honeydew to be forgiven for his intemperate lifestyle and thievery.
Show Quincy kneeling and praying, looking up at the stars and moon. While he’s a hypocrite to a certain extent, having gambled and accepted stolen goods in the past, I still want him to appear sympathetic. I’d like to believe his faith will outlast his hypocrisy, in ways that are earnest and profound. Think of St. Augustine. Think of Johnny Cash.
The next morning, Pablo Honeydew returns to the Fontenots’ backyard with a pair of bolt cutters. He cuts the lock off the latch and removes the top of Quincy’s pen.
“You’re free to go or to stay, Quincy. If you choose to escape, follow the trail that begins at the edge of the woods and go north. You’ll find me there in my warren of pleasure, in the stump of a dead oak tree. I would take care of you. I would teach you thrift and trade. And you could still be a storyteller, while you cobble shoes or repair marzipan chimneys, and you could train the songbirds to belt out your beloved Verdi.”
“I pray for you, Pablo Honeydew,” is all Quincy replies, and then he turns his back on his friend.
Pablo Honeydew tearfully hops away, knowing he has done all he can for Quincy.
Do what you can, artistically, to soften any glaring homosexual subtext. This story is about platonic male friendship. I hope to address homosexuality in the near future, in more hopeful and honest times.
Later in the day, as Quincy is napping peacefully, a hawk swoops down and impales him on its talons, carrying him up toward the stratosphere.
This also needs to be a few pages’ worth of illustrations. The hawk should be expressionless, to add to the terror. When showing them in flight, in the background the sun should be red, angry, inviolable, whatever that means.
As Quincy struggles against the hawk, the hawk rends his flesh mercilessly, sending his vital organs and blood into freefall, scattering pieces of him throughout the woods. It takes Quincy several minutes to die.
I don’t know; an anatomy text might be helpful. I would like to emphasize that in these pages the illustrations should take on a photorealistic quality. Or perhaps you could incorporate a collage style and use actual photographs of turtle entrails in this section of the manuscript. Again, the choice is yours.
Later that evening, Mr. Fontenot goes out to prepare Quincy for the soup. He is puzzled to see that the lock on the cage has been cut.
“Darn kids,” he says to himself.
Mr. and Mrs. Fontenot, while looking forward to eating Quincy, are not malicious people. They spent long hours researching how to kill him humanely.
Mr. Fontenot is again shirtless and drunk, to ease his remorse, and is holding a sharp knife and a very large syringe. I imagined a version of this narrative in which Fontenot ran amok through the neighborhood, terrorizing children, chiding them at knifepoint for stealing his turtle. He then resisted arrest by stabbing a police constable in the lower abdomen. But I think, aesthetically, this was flawed and merely a projection of my own desires to have evaded arrest and imprisonment. Fontenot will look like my father, no doubt, with the beard and the gut, and the constant presence of whiskey. Father was a gentle soul, in the final analysis. I think he would have just wept powerlessly if his turtle had been stolen.
The next day, Pablo Honeydew works up the courage to visit the Fontenots’ backyard. As he is hopping through the woods, he notices pieces of flesh and turtle shell and a great deal of blood along the trail to the Fontenots’. He realizes slowly what has happened, but hops and hopes against reason that Quincy is alive. When he sees that the cage is empty and that the vegetation in it has been disturbed by the descent of a large bird of prey, he breaks down and starts sobbing uncontrollably. He knows he is responsible for the last violent and painful moments of his friend’s life.
I envy Pablo’s clarity of conscience.
Pablo Honeydew falls into a deep and bitter depression, drinking too much carrot juice and enjoying the companionship of loose rabbit women. He also starts going to a weekly Russian Roulette game populated by other suicidal woodland creatures: cuckolded badgers and so forth. After coughing up blood one day, he visits his doctor, who tells him after performing a battery of tests that he has AIDS.
Pablo’s physician should be homophobic and wearing a plague doctor’s mask.
Pablo Honeydew dies in hospice care. I would like to believe, dear reader, that he is in heaven with Quincy and that they are eating carrots, procured legally of course, and playing cards and talking of baseball. But who knows? While logarithmic spirals are present in nature, is this real proof of an intelligent, benevolent creator? And even so, what guarantee is that of an afterlife? THE END.
I thought initially it would be nice to show a scene in heaven, pearly gates and an angel zydeco band. Gilded clouds. A bunch of forest animals pushing one another on swings. Skunk flautists and brown naiads consorting at the water’s edge. Very pastoral and Arcadian. Quincy and Pablo playing pinochle at the center of all things, and we would just end on this image of eternal fellowship. But last night, two inmates fought to the death by order of the corrupt warden and we all cheered, wildly, and in fact I picked up some Hungarian. I believe “megolik” means “kill him!” I think to be true to the spirit of the manuscript the last page should just be a black, blank space. The deepest, darkest black you can crush into a viable pigment. I assume you are still making your own paints.
Brace yourself, Ricky. This will likely be another disaster for us. We can caution children against laziness and intolerance, but that’s about all we’re allowed to do: instill common sense. Any kind of deeper spiritual treatise, especially when it assumes the form of a violent and bloody allegory, will be regarded as beyond the scope of children’s literature and its authors aberrant. I don’t understand this thinking, this conspicuous effort to insulate children from reality. The concept of a personal God is asinine. All existence is the dream of an indifferent and superior intelligence. Father used to tell me this each night before he went out drinking. “Now imagine all the tiny galaxies and people and botched ethnographies and massacres and awards show mishaps I will dream tonight when I lay my head to rest,” he used to say. “Tonight I will dream a doomed slave rebellion, or tonight there will be no cancer and no naturally occurring helium in the world. Imagine, my boy, the fiery zeppelins.” He was quite philosophical. My mother referred to him as deranged but I think she was simply a jealous insomniac.
Once Quincy sees the light of day, I will return to the compromising work which made us household names. I’ve got a rather insipid story about a llama who wants to race Formula One, much to the chagrin of the European jet set. The llama wins multiple world championships, but instead of experiencing depression and becoming addicted to black-tar heroin, which would be far more true to life, he graciously retires and opens a school for race car drivers in Lima. This school is not limited to camelids and therefore not subject to a discrimination lawsuit, but is in fact open to all species and everyone lives happily ever after. Larry the Llama is a decent fellow, and I’m sure with the right shading he could be endlessly fascinating. But first Quincy. I deserve to be humored.
I hope you are well. I mean that sincerely. How are the ponies?
I know it’s de rigueur to ask after your family, but I don’t remember any of their names. You know I’m a drinker, and that even when sober I am quite careless. Your wife’s name begins with an “M” or a “B” and is disyllabic. How is she? She was shapely and very good at cursing. She made excellent grits when I was hungover in the morning, after a long night in your study spent discussing the color of marrow or blood. Your sons’ names are completely lost to me. They never made much of an impression to be honest, though it’s certainly not their fault. After all, they were children.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avee Chaudhuri teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, an illegal restaurant he runs out of his office on campus.
