Something to Say
l to r: Groom’s brother, Best Man, Groom, Groom’s other brother, Groom’s brother-in-law
by Dominic Hilton
July 2024
On their 10th wedding anniversary, Dominic Hilton dusts off his roast wedding speech for fellow Emigre editor ASH Smyth and his bride.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, all the single ladies…
In the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?”
For those of you unfortunate enough not to know me, I’m Dominic and I’m the best man—and as tradition dictates it is now left to me to offer a dispassionate, even-handed, impersonal and entirely unemotional look at today’s groom…
So, here goes nothing.
A procrastinating nit-picker, a litigious downer, an underperforming monkey, a boorish pest, an irksome pedant, a degenerate up-chucker, a hair-splitting predator, a cryptic dingbat, a hypercritical pain mountain, a utilitarian scone, a Guinness-soaked zealot, a barbarian luddite, an effete parvenu, an elitist pikey, an unintelligible wordsmyth, a punctilious sociopath, an in-your-face obscurantist, a flouncey-shirted trooper, a debauched choirboy, a pantywaist Achilles, a dishevelled narcissist, a cream-puff provocateur, a Pooh-Bah Nanki-Poo, a pretender to the porcelain throne, a Kentish exoticist, a first-string fetishist, a cantankerous know-it-all, a captious, cavillous, carping, crabby blowhard, an Emperor in a mankini, an obnoxiously hirsute pretty boy... —Fiona, you’ve bagged yourself a doozy.
This sometime slayer of ink, this grammatical pedagogue, this directionless lounge lizard—I know we can all agree that Adam Samuel Hamilton Smyth may be the single-most-uncompromising human being ever to stagger drunkenly across God’s green Earth.
Uncompromising, that is, until today.
Fiona, I salute you. To paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald: you have successfully beaten off in a boat against the current of history—
Or however the saying goes.
As for your new husband, be warned. He has never met an argument he didn’t like, a sentence he didn’t correct, or a pretext he didn’t study. When he ignores your birthday, leaves you to pay the restaurant bill, or takes advantage of a hangover to desecrate your bathroom, he will justify his behaviour with an interminable defence that is both more archaic and meticulously rehearsed than anything raised before the High Court since the early thirteenth century.
His favourite words are “I win.” When you dare to ask him what exactly it is that he’s won, he callously dismisses you as “a feebleminded Frodo Douchebaggins.”
To be best friends with today’s groom is to find oneself in a constant struggle to establish any kind of context. But try this on for size: when ordinary folk get in touch, you hope it’ll be about something irrelevant; with Smyth, you hope and pray that his (inevitably barbed) communiqué will have some practical application.
It. never. does.
A few months back, he subjected me to a two-hour rant about why he didn’t care to be pressured by his housemate into watching the film Man of Steel. When I pointed out to him that the film itself only lasted two hours twenty minutes, he scoffed, accused me in his snarling voice of foolishly missing the point, and insulted my mum.
Just two weeks ago, I received a breathless text message from him that read: “I think I may have found a way to translate a Finnish poem—without speaking a word of Finnish!” His future plans include being the first person to read Finnegans Wake—a book he hasn’t read in English—in Latin.
In case any of you are wondering—and I know that the vast majority of you are —this is how he spends his days.
However, this odd creation before us was not by design. Quite reasonably, his real parents, who have asked me to pass on their apologies for not being able to join us today, fully expected him to be an opera singer, or a lawyer—or, more likely, both. A cherub-faced choirboy, he was Head Boy at his school (in more ways than one), and as a beardless youth was sent up to Oxford to study mummified corpses... some of whom were charged with teaching him Egyptology. Little did anyone know that this hugely promising young man would turn out to be a...
… a um...
… well, to use the job description he assigns to himself: a “libertine/warrior-poet”.
The irony has never escaped me that (another) of my heroes is the great enlightenment economist Adam Smith, with an ‘i’. Adam Smith with an ‘i’ famously wrote of “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, what a difference one letter can make.
It’s not that Adam Smyth with a ‘y’ lives in his own world; more that he lives in other people’s worlds – all of them fictitious.
He openly fancies himself...
... as part Count Almasy, part Indiana Jones, part Maximus Decimus Meridius, part Harry Flashman, part Gregory House, part Perry Cox, and part Will Hunting (when Will Hunting was laying bricks, that is, not when he was completing equations on chalkboards). Discussing a rare book with me once, he actually said—and again, this is a real quote—“I’d heard of it, back in the day (probably during my Oscar Wilde/Jim Morrison phase).”
Well, I know better.
In reality, the closest character I have seen him resemble is one of his own creation: namely, Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie, Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Universiteit van Ghwentse-Fanie.
Actually, that’s not quite true. In 1932, James Thurber wrote one of my favourite short stories. It’s called ‘Something to Say’ and features a character named Elliot Vereker, described by the narrator as “the only man who ever stimulated me to the brink of a nervous breakdown.”
I ask you to indulge me a little here, for I first read this story when I was 14, long before having met our groom, when I was saner and less troubled. But see if you can recognise certain familiarities in Thurber’s descriptions of his protagonist:
“He was never enthusiastic about employment in general.”
“He had no reverence and no solicitude.”
“He combined with his penetrating critical evaluations and his rare creative powers a certain unique fantasy not unlike that of Lewis Carroll. I once told him so. ‘Not unlike your goddam grandmother!’ he screamed.”
“He never finished [his masterpiece], nor did he ever finish, or indeed get very far with, any writing, but he was nevertheless, we all felt, one of the great original minds of our generation.”
“‘Achievement,’ he used to say, ‘is the fool’s gold of idiots.’”
“You have many things left to do,” I said to him. “Yes,” he said, “and so many people yet to insult.”
So, getting back to the ‘great original mind’ of our generation...
Not everyone likes him. He fell out with Oxford. He fell out with the co-author of his own book. He fell out with me at the book-launch. He has fallen out with choirmasters, vicars, conductors, cellists, editors, brigadiers, morris dancers, college presidents, publishers, riflemen, and once with an entire nation. The list is truly endless, and likely includes most of us gathered in this room, and at least three hundred of those who send their apologies for being unable to be here today.
The kindest way to put it is that Smyth is his own worst enemy, or prone to cutting off his nose to spite his face. But somehow, kindness doesn’t do him justice. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the man seated before us today has taken deliberately sabotaging his own advantage to new and historically unprecedented levels. I’ve done some research, and I’m confident that his only real-world likeness is a man named Franz Reichelt, a hapless inventor of a non-functional flying suit who in 1912 obstinately jumped to his death from the top of the Eiffel Tower just to prove a point.
And what if we err on the side of fiction? In Daphne du Maurier’s classic bestseller Rebecca, it is argued (in court) that the eponymous siren could never have topped herself, as she would have had to have opened the seacocks and drilled holes in the planking of her own boat to scuttle it at sea—and who, the argument goes, would ever do such a thing?
I know who. Du Maurier’s plot would’ve fallen apart had she ever met today’s groom.
As indeed have so many plots when confronted by this polymathic braggart. Whether it’s his distaste for what he once called “James Joyce’s retardo illiteracy,” or his willingness to pen interminable reviews of avant garde penis-puppetry shows for no money, there is very little on our tiny planet that successfully escapes (what he himself terms) his “razor-sharp mirth.”
He is, not to put too fine a point on it, an egomaniac to rival Nero. His every move is designed to make him look heroic in a reverential autobiography. One of his favoured projects is a book he intends to edit about people’s first impressions of him.
I’m not kidding.
I once made the error of starting a magazine with him. On the subject of readers—or lack thereof —he told me, “If more than four people understand your work, then you can consider yourself a failure.” Judged by his own criteria, then, Fiona, you hooked yourself a real winner. If, that is, you can call any of his co-called output ‘work’.
The Best Man is banished outdoors after his speech.
When he joined the Army and volunteered himself to go fight the Taliban, I naturally asked him what in Allah’s name he was thinking. He said, and again I’m not kidding, “I intend to rewrite the Iliad. Improve it, actually. With me as Achilles.”
As I stared at him, I was, unavoidably, reminded of a passage in The Flashman Papers, which runs, “It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not so far off the mark.”
In preparation for today’s joyous occasion, I re-read his missives from the front last week while lounging poolside at a beach club in Mallorca. From what I can gather, his watch-tower duty involved authoring letters to the Times, reading the New Yorker, and catching up on box-sets of Californication. In one letter, which ran to about the same length as the phone book, he complained to me that he was “missing normal civilian comforts—like sex and beer and copies of the Times Literary Supplement.” The toughest fighting he saw was when a scuffle broke out between the squaddies in the NAAFI over the volume of froth on their respective mocchachinos.
So, again, the futility of my task today, is, I trust, apparent to all. Try as I do, it’s not easy to compete with a man so thoroughly dedicated to autobiographically assassinating his own character.
I remember one particularly vile occasion when he swore me to secrecy—making me do something unspeakable with my pinkie—before confiding that he was something called “a functioning alcoholic.” I’ll never forget the way my derisive howls echoed in the wooden rafters of whichever Dickensian public house we were lying in. I shifted in the trough, clasping a friendly, understanding hand on his trout-like shoulder, and yelled, ““FUNCTIONING”?!?”
Anyway, before I stick a fork in this roasting, a brief word on the groom’s appearance:
On a good day, he looks like a man captured by the Taliban, thrown into a torture pit for six years where he finally breaks and joins ISIS—a hope of his, incidentally, that tragically failed to materialise on his tour of Afghanistan. Back home, he wears a scarf woven in some hilltop housing project just south of Addis Abbaba from the hair of the town’s lone goat. Which would be fine, only he wears it, in the height of summer, to those Weatherspoon’s pubs strategically located at the bottom of English council block towers, wherein he is also invariably ‘armed’ with some knackered 300-year-old poetry tome he’s pilfered from the Royal Geographical Society. On flights to Eastern lands, meanwhile, he wears his Mr. Jihad T-shirt, depicting a Mr. Men character moonlighting as a suicide bomber. When that’s in the wash, he sports either a Superman T-shirt, emblazoned, of course, with his own name, or an obscene vest proudly declaring his (apocryphal) White Trash status. His favourite—and only—button-down shirt is from Primark; and yet he loves to wear full military regalia, or white tie, to Burger King – to which, incidentally, he is so philosophically committed that (there’s no other way to put this) he will keep you awake for days detailing the labyrinthine depths of his ethical covenant with the train-station Whopper.
This is a complicated man.
In the final analysis, however, I love him. Potentially more than Fiona does. If not as often.
Meanwhile, if all of this sounds much like a hasty first draft, well, that’s because it is. I look forward to delivering the full and utterly impeachment-worthy character annihilation on the occasion of his death.
Smyth, you bastard, I am inconsolable that you chose Fiona’s hand over my own. As you know, things tend to go a little awry for me when you are not around. I do unfortunate things, like fall off ladders, write books, and get engaged. On previous form, by this time next year, I’ll probably be a woman.
Fiona, what can I say? You’ve got a humungous pair of balls, I’ll give you that.
Your (first) husband is my best friend, and the smartest man I know. It pains me to say so, but a world without his unworkable standards would be an altogether flabbier place.
And despite all of the above, and years of wallet-busting therapy, I can do nothing but love a man who, butchering Oscar Wilde, once declared, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking for loose change.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bride and Groom.
