Monday, October the 4th, 2004

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More About Ah-Fang

We learned on Thursday that Mrs Gubbins' second husband, Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, died in the Hindenburg Disaster (see 30th September). The brief paragraphs from her autobiography-in-progress which we reproduced scarcely do justice to Ah-Fang, however, for he was an endlessly fascinating man, with a brain the size of an airship, such as that in which he perished. In his memoir The Ah-Fang I Knew, F X Duggleby wrote as follows:

“Ah-Fang harboured certain ideas about phosphorescence, parallelograms, and the life cycle of the funnelweb spider which challenge the Weltanschauung, or at least my Weltanschauung. He often likened his curiosity about the world to a raven regurgitating food for its young, although it is difficult to grasp quite what he meant by this analogy. Much given to solitude, he would lie for hours in a tin bath, paring his fingernails insouciantly and humming what he called the ‘true music of the spheres'. At other times, such as cocktail parties, he would start up an unearthly keening, pressing a medicine ball to his chest. Fluent in Flemish and Finnish, he was surprisingly inarticulate in such exciting languages as Wendisch, or Sorbian, Sea Dayak, Pedi, Pangwa, Petit Mauresque and Micmac. His widow Bathsheba once calculated that he devised over four hundred distinct recipes for cold soup, despite an abnormality of the taste buds which had afflicted him since a childhood accident in a meadow, on a Wednesday, with a blowtorch, in a frenzy.”

Duggleby appears to be mistaken regarding Ah-Fang's cocktail party behaviour, for the man who so nearly became Pope, Giordano Sforza, left a vivid account of a bash one night on the outskirts of the Vatican in 1923.

“Ah-Fang, brilliantined and slobbering, entered the room. I could see that his airship-sized brain was pulsating more terrifically than it usually did. I could see this because, like Ray Milland, I was The Man With X-Ray Eyes. I have always said that my special gift cost me the Papacy, but this is not the time to bemoan my slow decline into beggardom, penury and insignificance. No, in those days I struck a fine figure as the confidante of such men as Ah-Fang. His presence filled the room, despite all those glittering chandeliers and the expensive furniture. He spoke but briefly, in an aside, to some foreign ambassador of preening contemptibility, and I was unable to hear exactly what he said. He spent most of the evening leaning against a harp, steadily devouring pies and enchanting a number of floozies with the enigmatically mute braggadocio of his flim-flam.”

Ah-Fang's greatest legacy may well be the dredging of the canal at Gaarg on the eve of the Batcake-Akido Conference, a full account of which can be found in Dobson's pamphlet The Dredging Of The Canal At Gaarg On The Eve Of The Batcake-Akido Conference (out of print).