I, Ripper: A Novel

“I don’t get ironic,” said Harry. “Never have. Iron, the ore? It has to have iron in it?”

“No, no, Harry, not the ore. It’s got to have a deft way of saying something A, so absurd and preposterous, that it decodes to something B, the exact opposite. When you asked Jeb about the shooting, he said, ‘Quite jolly.’ Lacking much sense of how we speak over here, you thought he meant ‘Quite jolly.’ But in his voice was that elusive tone of which I speak, nuanced, coded, subtle, a series of inflections meshed perfectly with little facial expressions such as slightly lifted left brow, slightly snarled upper lip, and a kind of trailing, dissipating rhythm, by which he communicated to me and far more to himself that he considers such action as blowing little birdies out of the sky with twelve-dram blasts, so that there’s nothing left but feathers and gristle, positively ghastly. That’s irony. That’s what this letter needs. That will make it last.”

Harry took an excellent lesson from this. “He doesn’t like hunting?” he asked incredulously.

We ignored him. He’d never get it, even if the initial impulse had been his.

“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” I said.

“Jeb, you’re halfway to a fine future. I’ll play you big in recompense, and in a bit you’ll be able to jump to a posh rag like the Times, where your gifts will make your fame, and they’ll send you all over the world and all the publishers will be beating down your door for a manuscript.”

I knew I was doomed. He had me cold. I was the birdie in the sights of his four-dram. The man was a genius.

And so, my first masterpiece. Like any piece of great writing, it has no autobiography. You ca

Still, as I sat at what had become my desk in the newsroom, later that night after all the editions had been put to bed and most of the boyos had gone home or to the beer shop, I do remember odd notes coming together to form a melody, almost as if I were merely the conduit and something, some force (not God, as I don’t believe in Him and if I did, surely this is not the sort of enterprise He would willingly join), were dictating to me. For some strange reason, the word “boss” was in my mind, as Harry had used it to O’Co

Then from somewhere—God’s mouth to my ear, or the devil’s lips to my brain—I came across “ripping,” which was perfect euphonically, even if wrong technically. He hadn’t ripped them, he’d cut them. But ripping had the right sound and co

After that, it seemed to come. I had to work in the word “jolly” some place, and I did, and I left it poetically adangle, in a form I’d never seen or heard. “Just for jolly,” I said. I avoided, out of fastidious liberal grounds, any mention of Jews, as one of my secret impulses was to absolve them in my fiction. I wanted no pogroms and no Peelers acting as Cossacks on my conscience, as full as that organ already was. That I was proud of, that I took some moral pleasure in.

And finally, the name. Well, “Ripper” was already achurn in my mind, and I was so pleased with the phrase “shan’t quit ripping” that I didn’t want to let it go, although I knew I had to alter it to a noun form from the verb, both to prevent repetition of an uncommon sound and to continue a kind of word melody playing with that sound. “Ripper” presented itself to me. So if “Ripper” is more or less the anchor, one needs something without an R in it, to avoid singsong or alliteration. “Robert the Ripper” or “Roger the Ripper” just sounded silly. Indeed, you needed counteriteration, a name bereft of R’s and P’s, yet also, to place it firmly in British tradition, a stout, sturdy Anglo-Saxon blurt of a name. “Tom” came to me, and I almost went with that, as “John” was too soft and “Will” hard to say because it need a fricative stop in order to slide easily into the sibilance of the R’s and P’s, and then I remembered the flag, like some common shopkeep or mill hand, and the patriotic treacle of it provoked my radical sensibility profoundly, amused me.

Here was Irony, capital I, in bold italic. Irony! something that O’Co

II

BURNING BRIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Diary

September 30, 1888

Good Christ, what a day! I almost ran my luck, my escapes were equal to any hero’s at Maiwand, I felt the incredible agitations of the spirit and soul, to say nothing of abject fear turning my stomach to an ingot of pure lead. I had to improvise desperately, change courses, take risks, and cling when all else was gone to the mandate of boldness. And yet at a certain point I ran from a child. I now reach for a fine glass of port to settle myself enough to record the events of the last few hours.