Here is the Editor’s Note on the Author from my most recently completed novel: it is presented as having been written by Ted English and edited by me, which cunningly allows me to abdicate responsibility for the many mistakes which it is bound to contain. English has spelt taut as taught? Perhaps he meant something by it. I am only the editor, after all...
Editor’s Note on the Author.
Ted English was born on the twelfth day of April nineteen sixty-one, the son of a British Telecom engineer and a supermarket cashier. Always introverted, due to pathological indolence he failed to fulfil the early promise he had shown at school and entered the wide world with a very meagre collection of qualifications. He took a job supervising the construction of industrial concrete floors which involved periods of frenzied activity interspersed with long periods of crushing boredom, and which also involved a great deal of driving and international travel. He drove, in the six years he held the job, over six-hundred thousand miles and visited countries from the United States to Russia, Korea to Saudi Arabia. Throughout that time he maintained a sporadic relationship with Mary Jameson, his childhood sweetheart; she was a woman who was not well, and eventually she fled to the United States for, as far as English was concerned, no readily discernable reason.
The job did not agree with him and, following Mary’s flight, he began writing in order to escape the crushing depressive loneliness which assailed him in his hotel rooms: the first result of which was the epic failed novel, Desamparados ’76, which was about revolution and political intrigue on the South American island of Tierra Del Mar. Because of its enormous scope, Desamparados ’76 proved impossible to complete, and he was forced to impose a conclusion upon it which involved a nuclear explosion and the destruction of the island. The island would not stay destroyed, though, and haunted him relentlessly. He often referred to it in conversation (indeed, he often alluded to his own work, despite the fact that he was at that time the only person that had read it), and it was clear that he still held a great affection for the place.
Following the conclusion of Desamparados ’76 English met and fell in love with an Acmeist poet, Helen Chalmers. The relationship was an unequal one, and led him to experiment with poetry, experiments that led to nothing but frustration and the permanent scarring of his prose style. (War in English’s Apodidraskiana bears painful sequences which are clearly intended to be poetic, as well as some of English’s better completed poems). English’s relationship with Chalmers failed in the summer of nineteen eighty-six and he retreated once again into his prose writing, this time to develop an idea he had conceived for a novel set at the British seaside in winter about familial deception: The Family Plot. The ghost of Desamparados ’76 would not leave him, though, and infected the new novel until it became a battle between the new idea and the old, and, more broadly, between facets of English’s character.
He wrote the novel, which eventually became War in English’s Apodidraskiana, in only six weeks, which is remarkable, given that it took him six years to finish Desamparados ’76. Perhaps this enormous burst of productivity illustrates his desperation and anguish at the collapse of his relationship with Chalmers, for only a week after he noted in his diary that the novel was complete (on the twenty-fifth day of July, nineteen eighty-six) he disappeared and has not been seen since.
E. W.
The editor is proud to count himself a friend of Ted English, and is Professor of English at Crakethorne University.
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