Fast Fiction: Cult In Culture
The narrator in Richard Mallinson's story is led into error in his book on Tudor music. He regains his self-confidence by becoming an art critic. The delicious final sentence in this short tale will keep you chuckling for a day, and a week.
My book on Tudor music wasn't ready but Gilson's was - and published to much acclaim.
Annoyed, I left town to stay with old friends in their (as it happened) Tudor manor house. The morning after my arrival I saw a story in their daily paper headed, 'Music man's false note?'
The piece reported claims by a Cambridge professor that Gilson had made a serious mistake in his chapter on Thomas Tallis - and, as Gilson's only reply was 'no comment', I reckoned that the professor had proved a point.
I returned to London and checked my own section (not quite a chapter) on Tallis and found that I had made the same mistake, which I corrected at once.
When my book finally came out it was reviewed by Gilson in one of the weeklies. Being fair-minded, he called it 'excellent' - but he had a caveat.
'Regrettably there is a terrible error about Thomas Tallis,' he wrote, 'and this gives me the opportunity to refute the idiotic claims of the Cambridge school.'
*
Later I stopped writing about music. People had kept mentioning my Tallis gaffe until I felt like climbing onto the roof of the Royal Albert Hall and jumping.
So I became an art critic and before long I was made a member of the judging panel for the Grimshaw Art Prize.
As we deliberated, a wild-eyed little man rushed up and prodded me. He said, 'You must be the poseur who put the cult in culture.'
'Clearly a case of mistaken identity,' I said sternly, pushing him away.
'No,' he blustered, ‘I know you, you're the poseur who -'
'Yes, yes,' I said, standing up to my full height, 'we've heard all that, so would you now please bugger off and allow my colleagues and I the space and the time in which to savour the aesthetic qualities of this upended cinema seat with several names naively scrawled on it?’
