Tuesday, February the 7th, 2006

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Elegant Smudges

It was, he thought, a very elegant smudge, as smudges go.

“Look at this smudge,” he said to his companion, pointing at the smudge with his forefinger, “Do you not think it elegant?”

His companion looked at the smudge, tossed her head, and then fixed him with an inscrutable gaze.

“You do not think it elegant?” he said, as a beetle crawled out of his tousled hair and launched itself into the shimmering air. It was a flying beetle.

So begins one of Dobson's few attempts at writing fiction. And so, too, does it end, for he never wrote another word of what, only that morning, he had confided to his diary was to be “a brilliant money-spinning scheme… I will write a potboiler, a guaranteed bestseller, a novel of triumph over adversity, with a dashing hero and a sultry heroine, a helter skelter adventure of international intrigue, high finance, technological wizardry and scrupulously-researched background detail. It cannot fail!”

He scribbled those last three words with such vim that he rent the paper in his journal, and it was thick, creamy paper to boot, not easily rent. Forensic Dobsonist Jim Pond sees the rending as evidence of just how excited the out-of-print pamphleteer was on that March morning of glistening torrential showers and fractious gales.

“Dobson often lost all sense of reason when hatching a new scheme,” writes Mr Pond in a new article*, “but seldom can he have been so deluded as this. For at least four hours on that rain-mad March morning he seems to have been utterly convinced that the novel he called Elegant Smudges would not only be bought in the millions by an adoring public, but that he would actually write the damned thing in the first place.”

As is evident from the opening—and only—lines Dobson managed to jot down, the brilliant pamphleteer was a hopeless fictioneer. Mr Pond has unearthed a few working notes that Dobson made in the hours between his paper-rending journal entry and the abandoned beginning of the novel. “I think we are lucky,” he writes, “that Dobson stopped when he did, flung his pencil across the room, and strode out of the house in his big Canadian Forestry Service boots to enjoy the downpour.”

According to Mr Pond, Dobson was under the impression that a series of fifty-nine chapters, in each of which two unnamed protagonists examine a smudge, and disagree as to whether or not the smudge is elegant, constituted the makings of an unputdownable novel. Granted, each chapter was to be set in a different milieu, the smudges, elegant or otherwise, to be found in a bewildering variety of locations, but as Mr Pond points out, Dobson's notes list only “international airport” and “municipal bus depot”. Where the other fifty-seven smudges were to be is, as Alexander Scriabin might have put it, a Mysterium**. And did Dobson really think that readers would be turning the pages, breathless with excitement, awaiting the appearance in each chapter of a flying beetle?

Meteorological records for that day in March indicate that the teeming rainfall lasted until well into the afternoon. Having cast aside his pencil, and his aborted novel, Dobson, as we have seen, headed out into the soaking wet world. He returned, drenched of course, some hours later, having somehow managed to obtain certain obscure pastries from an unknown pie shop. These diverted his attention for the rest of the day, and by the time he collapsed in an exhausted heap onto his mattress of straw, the elegant smudges were forgotten.

In an infuriating addendum to his article, Mr Pond notes that the word smudge only occurs once more in the corpus of the pamphleteer's work, but he does not tell us where. This sort of thing makes my blood boil, so I am going to go out and throw things at squirrels until I have calmed down.

* NOTE : “Dobson And His Fleeting Fads” in The Bulletin Of Dobson's Fleeting Fads Studies, Vol IX, No 7, Tantarabim University Gymnasium Press.

** NOTE : See Tiny Little Hands, Decisive Mustachios, 29 January 2006