THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 6

Private Roman Eye

The first adversary was not Brutus. It was dinner. In a theatre restaurant, an actor does not walk into a room containing an audience whose sole purpose is to listen; he walks into a room containing plates, glasses, cutlery, waiters, conversations and at least one person who has just discovered that the gravy has reached a part of the tablecloth previously thought to be beyond its range. Julius Caesar may have been murdered, Rome may have been in uproar and the future of the republic may have been hanging by a thread, but somebody in the third row still wanted the salt.

That made the performance of Rinse the Blood Off My Toga¹ a different proposition from standing on a school stage and trusting that the curtain had established the rules. At school, the audience had been assembled for the performance, even if some of the boys may have attended under protest and others were waiting for the opportunity to discuss it unkindly afterwards. In the theatre restaurant, the performance had to establish itself against everything else happening in the room. Before Flavius Maximus could investigate the death of Big Julie, I had to persuade people that the investigation was more interesting than whatever they had been discussing over the remains of the main course.

I cannot now remember every detail of the production, and memory has probably given the evening more order than it possessed at the time. I do remember one night when a large contingent of workmates arrived together and made an occasion of it, which added a different kind of pressure to the performance. At the time, I had an office within a client’s place of work, so these were not distant acquaintances who could be relied upon to sit quietly in the darkness and forget what they had seen by Monday morning. They knew me, I knew them, and they had clearly decided that dinner, theatre and the opportunity to watch their resident accountant wander about in a toga represented excellent value for money.

Rather than pretend they were not there, I began interacting with them and improvising dialogue that drew upon people and situations familiar to the group, much to the chagrin of the producer and director, who had probably formed the old-fashioned view that actors should restrict themselves to the words supplied by the writers. The additional exchanges increased the danger of losing the rhythm of the sketch, but they also taught me something about recognising the audience in front of me rather than performing only for the audience imagined during rehearsal. I remember the character more clearly than I remember the room, which may be the point of this book in miniature, although I remember enough of that particular audience to know that Flavius briefly stepped outside ancient Rome and entered their workplace. Rooms disappear, costumes fade and the exact placement of tables becomes uncertain, but a line, a rhythm, an improvised moment or a way of thinking can remain standing long after the scenery has been packed away. Flavius Maximus remained because, beneath the toga and the detective patter, I recognised a mind travelling along routes that made perfect sense to itself even when everybody else, including on that night the producer and director, regarded the journey as a joke.

The sketch takes one of history’s most famous murders, filters it through Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar² and then hands the investigation to a private detective who appears to have wandered in from a black-and-white crime film by way of ancient Rome. Brutus hires Flavius to discover who killed Caesar, which is already an excellent arrangement because the murderer has appointed the investigator and expects the investigation to proceed without becoming “inconvenient”. That is less far removed from ordinary systems than we might like to admit. Institutions have always been comfortable commissioning inquiries, reviews and reports, provided the answer has the good manners not to identify the people who commissioned them.

Flavius does not show those manners. He follows the evidence, although the evidence often arrives disguised as a pun, a misunderstanding or a linguistic accident. He hears things literally, takes words apart and then puts them back together in a form that makes the supposedly sensible people sound ridiculous. The writers present this as comedy, and it is comedy, but comedy does not require the central character to be stupid. Flavius may be the only person in Rome who is actually listening to what everybody says.

That distinction matters to me because people who think differently are often mistaken for people who cannot think properly. The route is unfamiliar, so the destination is discounted before it is reached. A straight line is treated as evidence of intelligence even when it leads directly into a wall, while a wandering path is treated as confusion even when it arrives at the answer with enough time to order a drink. I have spent much of my life watching accepted logic receive respect because it was accepted, not because it was logical.

Flavius’s mind works through collision. Ancient Rome meets the private eye, Shakespeare meets the street, Latin meets English and solemn history meets the sort of man who is not going to let a murder interfere with a good piece of wordplay. A martini becomes a martinus because Flavius has ordered only one, and when the barman attempts to correct him, the correction is itself corrected on the perfectly reasonable basis that he would have asked for two had he wanted the plural. A garage can be dragged backwards through history and rebadged as a ferrarium, allowing the modern world to enter Rome without anybody feeling obliged to explain how it passed through customs. Porticos, rotundas, togas, daggers and Latin endings are all removed from the protective glass case in which respectable history prefers to keep them and put to work in the language of policemen, bartenders and men who know somebody knows more than he is admitting.

The laughter comes from the collision of worlds, but it also comes from the uncomfortable suspicion that Flavius’s reasoning is not as foolish as everybody pretends. He hears the accepted word, notices the inconsistency buried inside it and refuses to move on merely because convention has declared the matter settled. By refusing to preserve the dignity of the language, he exposes the weakness in the argument hiding behind it, and in doing so reveals a mind that may appear ridiculous only because it is travelling faster and by a less approved road than the people attempting to correct it.

That was something I would later do with taxation, insolvency, business failure and the various official dialects developed to ensure that ordinary people understood they were in the presence of expertise. Technical language can be necessary, and I have never believed complexity disappears merely because we would prefer a simpler answer. However, technical language can also become a curtain drawn between the person who knows and the person expected to comply. Once the curtain is in place, authority can stand behind it and blame the audience for not seeing.

The early ancestor of Not Your Ordinary Accountant did not carry a calculator. He wore a toga, talked like a detective and investigated a crime solved centuries before the audience sat down to dinner. Yet the essential method was already there. Take something serious, remove the ceremonial language, listen for the inconsistency and explain the conclusion in words that do not require the listener to surrender dignity before understanding can begin.

I do not suggest that I stepped off the theatre-restaurant stage and immediately announced a new professional communication strategy based upon Roman murder. At the time, I was trying to remember the lines, find the timing and keep the audience with me. Meaning often arrives late in my life, sometimes decades after the event has done the work. The younger Jeff performed the method before the older Jeff found the words to describe it.

Timing was the lesson the audience could not help teaching. A joke delivered while somebody is ordering another drink is not necessarily a bad joke, but it is a joke that has entered the room at the wrong moment. A pause held too long allows the room to escape, while a pause cut short can trample the laugh before it has properly stood up. I began to understand that communication was not simply the movement of words from my mouth into somebody else’s ears; it was the creation of a moment in which those words had somewhere to land.

That seems obvious when written now, but much of professional life is built upon pretending the opposite. We send a letter, issue a report, recite a rule or explain a consequence, then regard the task as completed because the information has technically left us. Whether it arrived is treated as an administrative detail. Knowing something and saying something are not the same as making it understood, and making it understood is not the same as making another person ready to act upon it.

Flavius survives because he understands attention, even when he appears to be losing the argument. He changes the rhythm, attacks the language and refuses to let solemnity settle over the scene. Brutus tries to control the conversation through position, urgency and the confidence of a man accustomed to being taken seriously. Flavius controls it through curiosity, persistence and the irritating habit of noticing what Brutus would prefer to leave unnoticed.

I have met Brutus many times since, although usually without the dagger. He appears as the client who asks for advice but has already decided which advice will be acceptable, the official who requests consultation after the decision has been made, or the system that invites independent thought and then measures it against the answer it prepared earlier. He is not always dishonest, and that is worth admitting. Sometimes he simply believes authority should determine the direction of logic rather than being tested by it.

The fight between Brutus and Flavius is therefore not merely the pursuit of a murderer. It is the fight between the authorised version of events and the inconvenient mind that keeps examining the joins. Brutus believes he owns the investigation because he commissioned it, while Flavius believes the evidence owns the investigation because evidence has no respect for billing arrangements. I recognise both positions because I have sometimes been hired to provide an answer when the person paying me really wanted permission.

There is anger in that recognition, although it is not the clean anger of a man who believes he has always been right. Advice can become its own performance, and the adviser can become too fond of the role of the person who sees what others cannot. I have no difficulty imagining occasions when my certainty arrived in the room before my empathy, or when the clever explanation mattered more to me than the frightened person receiving it. Flavius reminds me that cutting through solemn nonsense is useful, but cutting through the person trapped inside it is merely another form of carelessness.

That is where humour becomes more than decoration. Used well, it gives the listener a way into a difficult subject without requiring an admission of ignorance as the price of entry. It can say that the system is absurd without saying the person caught in it is absurd. It can loosen the fear around tax, debt, failure or compliance long enough for the real conversation to begin.

Used badly, humour becomes another display of power. The clever person makes the joke, the other person becomes the joke and everybody is expected to admire the distinction. I have never wanted Not Your Ordinary Accountant to mean the accountant who humiliates ordinary people for not knowing the rules accountants are paid to know. The name only has value when it means that serious knowledge will be carried across the gap in human language.

Flavius was very good at crossing gaps. His logic is frequently absurd in form, but it is rarely idle. The famous business with ordering a single martinus because the more familiar word sounds plural is not the reasoning of a vacant mind; it is the reasoning of a mind refusing to accept a convention merely because everybody else has stopped noticing it. He is wrong in the accepted language and right within the system he has constructed, which may be the condition under which much original thought begins.

I know something about systems constructed inside a mind. The analytical Jeff likes definitions, evidence, sequence and the comfort of a conclusion that can be tested. The human Jeff notices that people do not live in definitions, evidence can arrive with tears attached and sequence often collapses when fear enters the room. Flavius somehow allows both minds onto the stage, because he investigates as though facts matter while speaking as though people might still be listening.

The writers make him the joke because the sketch needs him to be funny. I do not object to that, particularly as I was grateful for the opportunity to stand inside the joke and hear the audience respond. However, the older I become, the less willing I am to accept that comic reasoning is lesser reasoning. A mind that can move between meanings, recognise contradiction and use language to expose it may be doing more work than the solemn mind reciting the approved explanation.

Solemnity has always enjoyed an undeserved reputation for intelligence. Put a man behind a desk, lower his voice and surround him with words other people are reluctant to question, and we begin granting him authority before he has said anything worth hearing. Give the same idea to a man in a toga who pauses for a laugh, and we assume the idea has been diluted. Perhaps the opposite is true, because humour has to survive contact with the audience while solemnity can often blame the audience for failing to appreciate it.

The theatre restaurant made that test immediate. The audience did not owe me attention merely because I had learned the part. They could return to their meals, continue their conversations or allow the performance to become pleasant background noise. To hold them, I had to make the words live in that room rather than merely reproduce them correctly.

That was both liberating and slightly brutal. School performance had taught me that another identity could give me permission to be heard, but the theatre restaurant taught me that permission was not enough. Attention had to be earned repeatedly, sometimes from sentence to sentence. The performer could not retreat behind the claim that the audience should have listened better.

Business later provided many rooms arranged in much the same way. The competing plates became payroll, debt, family pressure, fatigue, ambition, fear and the shiny object somebody had been told would solve everything by Tuesday. The client sitting across from me was not an empty vessel awaiting the wisdom of the accountant. He or she arrived already full of noise, and my technical correctness had to find a place among it.

That did not mean dumbing the advice down. I have come to dislike that expression when it is used to suggest that clarity is a concession made by intelligent people to everyone else. Good translation is not the removal of thought; it is evidence that the thought has been completed. The person who truly understands a complicated matter should be able to carry its essential meaning out from behind the curtain without dragging every piece of scenery with it.

Flavius does exactly that to Rome. He reduces the grandeur of assassination, conspiracy and republican crisis to a series of questions that expose motive and contradiction. The high language cannot protect Brutus because Flavius keeps bringing the matter back to what happened, who benefited and why the explanation does not fit. Rome wants history, but Flavius insists upon an interview.

The silliness makes the interrogation bearable. Brutus can posture, threaten and attempt to hurry the process, yet every exchange takes a little more control away from him. He has the title, the political standing and the accepted place within Rome, but Flavius has the better grip on the conversation. Authority is slowly defeated by a man willing to sound foolish while asking the question everybody sensible has agreed not to ask.

That may be why the role stayed with me more strongly than some supposedly more important performances. Jack Worthing allowed me to move between identities, and Giuseppe Palmieri allowed me to stand near the uncertainty of rank. Flavius allowed me to enjoy the mind itself. His odd associations were not something to hide until the room became safe; they were the engine of the performance.

There is a particular freedom in discovering that the thing which makes you difficult to place may also be the thing that makes people listen. I had spent enough of life sensing that thought should be kept within acceptable boundaries, particularly if it moved faster or in a different direction from the group. Flavius had no such respect for the boundary. He crossed it, made a joke about the crossing and then continued with the investigation.

I would like to say that I carried that freedom intact into every room that followed, but memoir should not reward itself with false consistency. There were many times when I returned to the authorised script, reduced the volume or allowed the proper title on the other side of the table to determine how much of my own mind was welcome. Impostor feelings do not always silence a person completely. Sometimes they allow him to speak, provided he disguises the sharpest part of the thought as humour.

Humour became both a tool and a permit. It allowed me to challenge without appearing to challenge, to point at an absurdity while leaving everybody the option of pretending we were only having a laugh. That can be useful, especially in rooms where direct confrontation closes the ears before the sentence is finished. It can also become a form of self-erasure when the speaker makes his own insight smaller so that authority does not feel threatened by it.

Flavius walks that line throughout the sketch. Everybody is permitted to regard him as ridiculous, but he keeps moving closer to the truth while they enjoy the permission. By the time Brutus recognises the danger, the clown has completed the audit. The investigation works because nobody takes the investigator seriously enough to stop him until the answer has become unavoidable.

I have sometimes wondered whether Not Your Ordinary Accountant developed from the same bargain. I could speak about serious matters in a way that did not sound like the official voice of the profession, and people might listen because the conversation felt less like a lecture. The risk was that the unusual presentation could cause the underlying knowledge to be underestimated. The advantage was that people who had stopped listening to accountants might listen to this one.

There is no simple victory in that. Being understood is not the same as being respected, and being remembered is not the same as being believed. Flavius can solve the murder and still be treated as though he has accidentally tripped over the answer. The outsider’s intelligence is often accepted only after it has been stripped of ownership and translated back into the language of the people who were entitled to be right.

The final exchange between Brutus and Flavius carries that entire argument inside a joke. Brutus, being taken away, reaches for the grand exit and declares, “All roads lead to Rome.” Flavius immediately recognises the quality of the line and wants it, not merely because it is clever but because it perfectly belongs to the world he has been navigating. Brutus refuses with the childish finality of authority protecting its last possession: “You can’t have it!”

I have always loved that moment, and not only because it lands so neatly. Brutus has lost the argument, the investigation and his freedom, yet he can still deny Flavius ownership of the words. The man with the title reserves the right to the memorable phrase even as the man treated as a joke has done the work. It is a tiny act of intellectual gatekeeping performed at the end of a murder confession.

“All roads lead to Rome” also describes the way my own mind has often worked. I may begin with a tax question, wander through human behaviour, stop briefly at fear, responsibility or greed, and eventually return to the original problem carrying something that was not visible from the direct route. To somebody waiting impatiently for the answer, the wandering can look like delay. To me, it is often where the answer is found.

The difficulty has been persuading other people to travel far enough with me. Some want the conclusion without the journey, while others want the conclusion they had before the journey began. Theatre taught me to watch when attention drifted, but it did not remove the frustration of seeing a room choose the familiar wrong answer over the unfamiliar right question. That frustration has fed some of the anger in my writing, although anger alone has never kept an audience from returning to dinner.

Flavius offers a better method. He does not ask permission to think differently, but neither does he stand apart and complain that Rome has failed to appreciate him. He enters the language of the room, bends it, exposes it and uses its own assumptions as evidence. His rebellion is practical because he remains committed to solving the case.

That practical rebellion became central to the adviser I tried to become. I did not want clients to admire the complexity of what I knew; I wanted them to understand what their numbers were saying before those numbers became an emergency. I did not want technical language to certify my importance; I wanted it translated early enough to change a decision. The work remained serious, but the performance of seriousness was optional.

There were times when the profession seemed to confuse the two. Gravity of expression was treated as proof of professional competence, while accessibility risked being mistaken for shallowness. Yet the client rarely needed another person to make the problem sound more intimidating. The client needed somebody who could rinse the blood off the toga, identify what had happened and explain why pretending otherwise would not restore Big Julie.

I cannot know how much of this began in that theatre restaurant and how much the older man has placed there because he can now see the pattern. Memory is not an audited set of accounts, despite my professional preference for supporting documents. It gathers meaning after the event, reallocates significance and occasionally places a helpful note beside a transaction nobody understood at the time. What I can say is that Flavius felt natural in a way that some other roles did not.

He gave me permission to be serious without being solemn. He demonstrated that the sideways mind could be disciplined, that wordplay could be analysis and that laughter did not cancel intelligence. He also showed me the cost of the arrangement, because the person who makes the truth easier to hear may discover that people remember the joke and forget who solved the case.

Perhaps that is why the denied line still matters. I have spent parts of my life doing the thinking, making the translation and then watching the conclusion become obvious once somebody with the proper authority repeated it. Resentment can grow in that space, particularly when the translator is expected to be satisfied that the correct answer eventually entered the room. The human Jeff wants recognition, while the analytical Jeff insists that a correct outcome should be enough, and neither has ever completely defeated the other.

Age has made me less embarrassed by the human Jeff’s claim. Wanting to be heard is not the same as wanting everybody else silenced, and wanting ownership of one’s contribution is not vanity merely because the contribution arrived wearing a joke. Flavius deserved the line because he understood what it meant within the case he had solved. Brutus could deny him the words, but he could not make the road belong to anybody else.

I hear that exchange differently now than I did while performing it. Then, the task was to hold the pause, let the audience anticipate the gift and allow Brutus’s refusal to complete the joke. Now, I hear a lifetime of systems saying they welcome difference while retaining the right to decide who may be credited with it. I also hear a warning not to become Brutus myself by hiring other minds, using their insight and keeping the best line because my name sits higher on the page.

The stage did not turn me into Not Your Ordinary Accountant, and Flavius Maximus did not secretly design the career that followed. Life is rarely that obliging, and this book should resist making every remembered work prophetic. What the role did was give one part of my mind a public shape and show me that it could hold a room. The audience was still eating, Rome was still ridiculous and the private Roman eye kept following the evidence until even Brutus ran out of road.

Today, I am less interested in whether Flavius was written as a sharp man or a foolish one. The character became sharp in the space between the words, the timing and the audience, and that is where I found him. He remains one of the words that formed me because he demonstrated that intelligence did not have to wear the authorised costume, speak the approved dialect or wait politely for solemn people to finish being wrong.

Brutus may keep “All roads lead to Rome” if he remains determined to own it. I have had enough roads of my own, many of them unnecessarily long and several apparently heading in the wrong direction until the destination appeared. The private Roman eye taught me to trust the investigation, respect the audience and never confuse the dignity of a subject with the dignity claimed by those who control its language. He also taught me that when authority refuses to give you the line, there is still the possibility of writing your own.

Notes

1. Rinse the Blood Off My Toga was written by Canadian comedy partners Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. First broadcast on CBC Radio in 1954, the sketch recast the assassination of Julius Caesar as a hard-boiled detective story, with Flavius Maximus as the “private Roman eye”; Wayne played Flavius and Shuster played Brutus in the original production.
2. Julius Caesar is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, generally dated to around 1599. The play dramatises the conspiracy against Julius Caesar, his assassination and its political aftermath; Wayne and Shuster borrowed its characters and famous setting while replacing tragedy’s solemn language with detective-story wordplay.