THE QUIVERING TOWEL

The Possessed is a potboiler, an unwilling gothic novel written by a European avant-garde writer; Witold Gombrowicz went to Argentina from Europe in 1939; he needed money: a quivering towel in the old kitchen, blue/black lips, like to like spreading like a virus, a crusty, withered, crazy prince in a castle; Signs, Treasure, Etc. Writing is restlessness. Everything in this narrative evades the narrative. Jack goes up the hill but he also goes down. A false novel, an infernal machine, said Sartre. Gombrowicz writes as he discards, discards as he writes. The Possessed is the sardonic tale of a rising tennis star, her coach, her fiancé, the castle down the road, the quivering towel, the old kitchen. A suggestion, fifty pages from the end of the book, is to declare war on the quivering towel, source of all evil. 

I have long loved what I called bad novels — by Mrs Henry Wood, Ouida, William Gerhardie, Kay Dick — all contentious — bad is always contentious. The Possessed is a bad novel. Is a bad novel a false novel, an infernal machine? Is all writing an infernal machine?

These are the layers of reading The Possessed, filling a glass with their variety, like layers of sand from the Holy Land.

We think the world of you, J.R. Ackerley

The last paragraph of We think the world of you is as poignant as a story gets. Evie the Alsatian dog holds the centre of the novel; she is the Tulip of My Dog Tulip, and the Queenie of J.R. Ackerley's life. He struggled with his human Ideal Friends; most of his humanity went to his dog, Queenie/Tulip/Evie, who was guardian of his solitude, for which he was grateful; it was what he wanted; or was it? What is about a novel that allows a writer to say more than he has in a memoir? The stretch of fiction, the stylising, the reducing or amalgamating, Ideal Friends, dogs, In-Laws, real or imagined, desired, or maybe not. This dog, Evie, takes jealous possession of his life.

Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity of contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no, yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about .... But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.

WHAT DO FOURTEEN YEAR-OLDS DREAM NOW

In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. She asked others about their dreams, and wrote them down. What we can't say, can emerge in dreams. 

I'm riveted. This is my territory. How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions?, Zadie Smith asks in a review of a new English edition of this book of dreams. Now, in our times, do people mistake control for comfort? Are they nesting in algorithms? Are social media sucking out the marrow of our attention? There is much talk from E. Musk about freedom of speech. What has happened to freedom of thought? The OED's word for this year (they add a word every year) is brainrot (from too much mindless screen time). What kind of dreams does brainrot give you?

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books ends her essay on The Third Reich of Dreams: the nightmares of a nation with an update: a talk she gave to 400 14 year-olds in Barcelona, ostensibly about fiction, but really they wanted to talk about social media. It was hard to get rid of slavery— it took riots, murder, changes in the law — the Third Reich needed world war two to bring it to an end. All you have to do to get rid of social media, she said to her young audience, is to look the other way.

Names:

Jhumpa Lahiri avoids names, of people, places, as if naming were owning or presuming more than she means to, more than she can.

I read Whereabouts and then Roman Stories, mostly at night, for company. Without names you set yourself a formal problem, how to fix people without naming them, how to write them into the reader's awareness, the writer's willingness. To say only just enough, and then move on. 

The art of fixing people in a story in order to think about them, and yourself, and to shape a story, is soporific and convivial in the middle of the night. 

Next day I think about the reticence, the strain of it: this is as close she can come to the people she writes about, lives among, perpetual foreigner, self-regarding as you're forced to be, as most of us are forced to be, while being off-hand, obedient, unexceptionable. 

I should note straightaway that P's parties took place every year at her house, on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon, during the mild winters we typically enjoy in this city.

We can take any amount of drama after that.  

The Blue Flower

I read The Blue Flower every few years and different things show through. This time I noticed the Bernhard, age six, also known as the angel of the family—his mother saw him as a page at the court of the Elector of Saxony—one of the younger brothers of Fritz von Hardenburg, German Romantic poet who chose to write as Novalis. The Bernhard has learned some powerful truths at a young age. After being reprimanded for going through a visitor's possessions, he calmly says at breakfast next day, 'In a republic there would be no possessions.' How does he know, age six?  Yesterday a friend said one of her brothers at the age of five declared at breakfast that he no longer believed in God. Sometimes children just know.

And parents know not what they have created. Especially at the end of the 18th century, when children were produced in quantity, and mostly did not survive into adulthood, let alone old age. Of Novalis' family most were dead before adulthood; Novalis died at 28. Mostly they died of consumption. Doctoring was very particular; one doctor believed in fresh air, exercise, sex and alcohol. Another believed that being alive was unnatural and that people needed opium to keep them calm and schnapps with wine to boost them, in order to achieve the kind of balance we call life on earth.

Fritz (Novalis) (Hardenburg) has started a poem, not in verse, called 'The Blue Flower'. He reads it to his friend Karoline (Justen), to whom he had given his entire confidence. She is pleased and confused. Soon Fritz meets twelve-year-old Sophie, his Wisdom, his Philosophy, friend of his spirit. He hires a painter to make a portrait of her but he fails, because, as he says, all creatures emit a question, and he could not hear Sophie's question.

The German view of university education was that it was best to attend as many universities as possible in order to learn fundamental questions about being alive, questions that one could continue to think about for the rest of one's life: 'The problem of a universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man'.

As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different of measurement.

Flight Without End, On the Road, Young Adam

Three novels about drifting, 1920s to 1950s, by Joseph Roth, Jack Kerouac and Alexander Trocchi. 

In Flight Without End, Franz Tunda, First Lieutenant in the Austrian army, is taken prisoner by the Russians, escapes, finds himself in Siberia where he stays for three years with a Pole who counted his words like pearls. Franz has a photograph sewn into his coat of his fiancée Irene who must be waiting for  him in Vienna. Way up in Siberia they do not hear that World War 1 has ended, and later this seems enviable. Franz leaves and travels west; he finds something like a wife in Baku; further west he is taken by the Red Army, prisoner or comrade much the same by then. He visits his brother in a town on the Rhine; no warmth here, nothing heimlich or gemütlich that he can bear; he hears that Irene has married and lives in Paris. He goes to Paris. When they finally meet she does not recognise him. 'No one in the world is as superfluous as he.' 

Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam came up this week in film versions. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty career around America, extravagant in their big jalopies, loose and louche behaviours flow as fast as they can think them up. Their freedom looks indulgent, restless, self-congratulatory. Proust, whose Swann's Way is often in the foreground of indoor scenes, looks indulgent too. 

Drifter Joe, in Young Adam, working the barges out of Glasgow, working all the women he meets, is determinedly indifferent, cold; drifting is the point of drifting. He watches his girlfriend drown in only her petticoat, knowing she couldn't swim. She is pregnant, of course. He dodges that and quits the country. In the next book he'll fetch up in New York on heroin. 

Franz Tunda is not able for the society to which he returns. He prefers Siberia and the companionship of the Siberian Pole, who'd come as a convict and settled of his own free will. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty see no society except their own. They haven't come back from a war. Young Adam is a nihilist; the only way is onwards and downwards. Joseph Roth's nineteen twenties is a richer, sadder landscape. Or so I find. According, maybe, to the principle that influential inner landscapes come from a generation earlier, not one's own. 

BONE INTO STONE

Bone into Stone, Jhumpa Lahiri's essay on translating Ovid, made me suddenly aware again of the enchanted zone of the text — Ovid's The Metamophoses is not a book, it's a text — such attention to the word is already a translation.

I like thinking this way. While the saga of the neighbours rolls on — we have brought in a 3-ton digger — where would I go but to the page? Metamorphosis. Changing, turning, erring, stumbling. The stone, the living, infinitely flexible stone, the one you trip over, the one that makes you write. 

(At times I wonder if translation is tantamount to another language spreading, lava-like, over a pre-existing text, allowing it to live on in the very act of silencing it.)

Bone into Stone made me think of Bone the Dancer which I have been translating or wanting to translate into the person I now am. The difficulty, the endurance of re-reading it, moving it into the person I now am, wondering in turn who that is, the way you find it hard to see yourself in your own shoes.

I have translated bits of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and a short story by René Daumal. I have never translated myself. 

WHAT READING DOES (FOR ME)

I could be reading Jhumpa Lahiri for the second time in the middle of the night, if reading is to be in someone else's life. 

In the morning I'm reading/weeding among young birch trees, pulling out the strangely satisfying square roots of field woundwort, yellow nettle roots ripping through the upper earth, new goosegrass, already confident, nascent perky ivy. 

At the end of the day I'll read the New Yorker in the bath. How much writers' archives go for even while they're alive.

Reading is the model. 

The day aligns.

THICK AND THIN

The clocks have changed. Damp day. So-so mushroom foray after breakfast. Then the wilds of ryanair online for a while. For the rest of the daylight I read Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts, stopping a while after each short chapter — a walk, going to the supermarket, or the cafe, away on a trip, and home, the piazza, needing to hear a car go past in order to sleep. This is slim writing, low-key, less icy than Fleur Jaeggy, more bewildered but safe, somehow, in her city. 

In the bath I read Alexander Navalny, 2022 to 2024, in prison in the soviet arctic, calling out, sending hugs, reminding people not to be afraid. He shovels snow with a frozen wooden shovel. His only company on the cell block is an operatic psychotic who doesn't sleep. He knows he may well die here. 

Thick and thin reading at another turn of the year. The sky flushed red at dusk.

Aftereffects of reading Moby Dick

Anything I try to read after Moby Dick is awkward. Jon Fosse is very awkward, benumbed, northern. Machado de Assis, the essential stories, is from Brazil, so the air is thicker and the pages hold back with some unexpected turns and perfumes. And these are short pieces, a page or two, not more than fifty. Lakes and chasms, shards and shafts, moments. 

Moby Dick is six hundred pages. Ahab's inner life and Melville's across the four ocean meadows of the globe, the explanatory map at the back of the book, with its dotted line ending in shipwreck somewhere off Japan, all you need to know. The white whale triumphs. Too many whales died in order to light the words of politicians declaring their protection of living things. 

In Moby-Dick, Melville calls the ocean the"dark side of this earth" and he's right"  ...  "almost all the ocean is dark almost all of the time."

This afternoon I read Verlyn Klinkenborg, 'What the ocean holds' in The New York Review of Books. He sets up on a scale Melville would understand, the globe and its oceans, its heaving inner life. 

Billions of pounds of plastics and micro plastics and nano-plastics—smaller than the dust particles we breathe—are washing into the ocean every year, affecting nearly every aquatic species in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.

We are used to talking about global etc, but our speech is corrupted. It's possible, says Verlyn Klinkenborg  

that our capacity to adjust to almost any "new normal" may turn out, ironically, to be one of our greatest liabilities as a species..... it's now estimated that Earth's biosphere is "95 percent deep ocean". Think for a moment what that means: most of this planet's biosphere, as one scientist put it, "exists in the dark."

Like Ahab. Like most of us. 

MOBY DICK on the beach

I  read Moby Dick on the Ilha da Tavira, not as a sea person but as a woman displaced from her meadow and finding it, with interest, in Melville's language, his sousing in matter, in nature, and the mind. Chapters end with a thought more than a brink. The end of Chapter 70:

"Still ho! cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.

"Aye well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunderclouds swept aside from his brow. "That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. —Where away?"

"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!"

"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."

The Sperm Whale is a Platonian, says Melville, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. Ahab is madness maddened. Everything weighed in the scales of the New Testament. Ishmael needs more than a hundred pages to set out from Nantucket in the Pequod, as Tristram Shandy takes most of his book to be born. Captain Ahab is as unseen as Orson Welles lurking beneath postwar Vienna in The Third Man; Ishmael has to meet and become brothers with Queequog, the royal from an off-the-map south sea island, before the ship can sail.  

Before we meet Ahab we must experience killing whales, hauling them on board, cutting them up, barrelling the oil, we must encounter other whaling ships and their tales, the globe circled in search of a white whale, oceans as meadows, the soul fully stretched, Ahab's special lunacy storming his general sanity, and then ours.

The beach in October. Yes. Who's there and what are they thinking about as they lie there, or walk west, or east; what are they relieved of, what do they have to say, who is listening. A man called Paul has set up at the back of the beach, his enclosure, his base. Because it is a public place, he states his case about nudity. Others are encouraged. It's the end of the season, mosquitoes are out in calm spots. Ferries ply to and fro, a warship goes through, a yacht or two in the distance. 

To this day people are uncertain as the function of spermaceti, the substance in the whale's head that gave lighting oil and a base for unguents in the nineteenth century. One of the Pequod's crew nearly drowns in a whale's head, rescued by Queequog, royal, modest, throughout. Ishmael likes to think that the oil rises up through the ship's masts, union of whale and wood.

Chapter 94

A Squeeze of the Hand

.... As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost with in the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their one; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow ....

 

Bartleby, Beckett & some former selves

The weave this week was Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, diverse landing places in the New Yorker, and my diary from 50 years ago, to say nothing of last night's dream. Francine Prose has published her account of 1974, A Personal History, and I have re-read mine for the same year— she is the same age as me, Brooklyn-jewish as I am Nowhere-jewish. Francine Prose lived out the politics of the counterculture; I moved to Ireland, ate the evening light and wanted to tell everything, which may have been a passion born of displacement, or just the age I was at, soused in language, and the new solitude of an unfamiliar place. 

Reading Bartleby was like home. The gentle language of refusal. I prefer not to. Those who prefer not to do not prosper and not prospering is what they prefer. What's hypnotic about Bartleby is this gentle, melancholic space. You land there and it's so much quieter than refusing cookies on a website; it isn't countercultural, it isn't a protest, Bartleby enters the central void, or great peace, not against anything, nor for anything either, mildly dismissing every intervention, up to and including his own life.

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

THE HONEY SIEGE

From the bedroom bookshelves, dawn blossom plucked late night, I took The Honey Siege by Gil Buhet, Penguin 1958. A bunch of 13 year-olds protest their innocence by occupying the Bastide, drawing up the long-static drawbridge and holding out. They hadn't stolen honey from the schoolmaster's hives, it was the transfer of power, real or imagined, from the schoolmaster, the mayor, the innkeeper and other parental units, to their sons. Blood and Freedom. Abracadabra. The future was theirs. This is a Truffaut delinquency, with shades of Swallows and Amazons. Rebellion and rightfulness. 

I finished The Honey Siege up at the reservoir on the last day of summer — the only day of summer? The sons of Casteilcorbon know their history, they have been well-tutored and they win the day. The honey siege ends peacefully, the real thief, Maria the slavey, is now one of their number as they readjust to town life and consider piracy for the next summer. 

STARTLING SANDWICH

Mixed reading diet, a startling sandwich of a lost gay novel from 1928 and a much lauded Norwegian trilogy from 2014. 

In my diary from September 14th 1974, two weeks into Ireland and a touch of mania already setting in, loneliness and consequent plunder of all resources, I read a novel I have never seen since, To Kiss the Crocodile. How come in all this time I have never noticed a novel on my shelves with a title like that? I looked up across the room to the newly rearranged bookshelves under the windows. A black volume, with the spine missing. Yes. Soft inlaid paper, 1928. To Kiss the Crocodile, a novel by Ernest Milton, actor, well-received interpretations of Hamlet etc, I learned on wiki, but there was no mention of a novel he wrote. No mention either of a newly transplanted, newly invented french lecturer, lodged with her books and music in the annexe of an early Victorian villa looking out on Cork Harbour reading it straight through in a day and wondering if she'd forgotten something, a whole human being, perhaps, herself?

Ernest Milton is prey to what he can't say, which gives rise to a long, repetitive, desperate, tumultuous, frozen novel. In 2024 I read it fast, impatient and sympathetic, both. My impatience, and my sympathy, is not only with Ernest Milton, it is also with my younger self who bought the book in the first place. 

Jon Fosse writes an elemental tale out of his Nordic inheritance, his sureness. Like Tarjei Vesaas, he knows a tiny village by a fjord, isolated people, small, intense compass: a cottage, a boat, the glittering fjord, fiddle playing, floating with the music, with hunger, expedience, and the still form of the story through several generations around which he'll ply his language. 

Between the elemental and the tumultuous in a fine week in September. 

A DIARY UNNERVED

I have been reading my diary from 1974, when I first came to Ireland. I had a better pen back then, the nib medium oblique, the diary octavo, ruled feint. I was staying in the annexe at Glenmore, outside Cobh, with a soft and worthy family, Swantons, in their longtime place, writing lectures about French poets I didn't like, waiting for the rush of light at the end of the day, the start of teaching, the next encounter, and the foghorn across the harbour. I picked up hitchhikers, talked, walked, drove about, all eyes, ears and interiority, picked watercress and carragheen along the beach, ate windfall apples. 

A diary is a fine place to build a life. Reading myself fifty years ago I can see that. I can see who I was and who I still am. In the same country. Such a distance between Glenmore, outside Cobh, in Cork Harbour, and Inniscarra, where I went next, where I still am. 

On Sunday I went to Glenmore to mark the anniversary, I walked along the beach and up the grassy path to the house. As with the fortieth anniversary, ten years ago, there was no one there. I knocked and rang defunct doorbells, noticed the geraniums and the windfalls, apples and pears, on a table outside. Went back down to the beach and had some bengal spice tea from my flask. It was a flat grey day. A sharp wind off the refineries. Ten years ago there were dead fish; I read Virginia Woolf and remembered the rowboat that used to be on the beach. 

This time there was a pale pink fleece dropped on the grassy path up. I never fail to be moved by the path up from the stony beach, the mowed grass, the hydrangeas, the stone steps up to the terrace in front of the house. Just as my friend Annette said that my mother's kitchen was the model for hers, perhaps the setting of the Swanton house was the model for Inniscarra, though there is no sea, no harbour, here, I have wanted to find the mean level of this side of the hill, to plant it as it deserves, as we all deserve.

THE END OF AUGUST

In a viewing room in Culver City, Los Angeles, May 1981, on a very comfortable private sofa, I watched a freshly-minted movie, The End of August: flawless sky, long sand, soft horizon, parasol framing the face, the sea, the end of August pristine for all time. From the novel by Kate Chopin, which I haven't read. The film has also vanished from sight. The beach remains.

My Sebald summer had interludes of Norman Maclean and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as well as The New Yorker and Hortus. P was surprised I liked Norman Maclean. Sometimes an action tale, language as muscular as logging, as delicate as fly-fishing, so hard-won, is what the reading body needs.

I'm nearing the end of Austerlitz up at the pond. Watching bumblebees work the scabious. The end of August in Inniscarra. Wind from the southeast, a yapping dog and a truck permanently reversing. I'm learning the art of letting things slide off a duck's back, and sleeping better.

Austerlitz is as compelling as your own past, or anyone's, half-restored, half-escaped. I can't read too much at a time, then I have to turn away and watch a spider repair the damage I did to its web when I sat down. 

Since I was twenty I have tried to confirm with patient handiwork, as Sebald says in the introduction to A Place in the Country, my peculiar position, his peculiar position, theirs, ours, wanting to write all the time, keeping a diary, following a route, taking photographs, most of which deepen rather than clarify. 'There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.'

Perhaps it would be better simply to set down .... a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.

CONTES CRUELS

On my former teaching shelves, I found a battered french book with no back and a detached front cover, frayed & browning pages, soft as an animal. The plays of Corneille. I'll never read that again. I threw it in the stove basket and, a day or two later, thought I'd put it in the fire, looked at the opening pages, it wasn't Corneille at all, it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, friend of Mallarmé, his NOUVEAUX CONTES CRUELS et PROPOS D'AU DELA, and a few fragments inédits. Soft chalky pages are seductive. French publishing a hundred years ago followed the aesthete, the effete, as now the pronoun sensitive. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam — I don't know what his friends called him — was a creature of his own decline. La vieille France, la France profonde, has a network, a spider's web, of decaying aristocracy, and he was one such, working his way out of reality as much as he could. Vivre, les serviteurs le feront pour nous.  

Sara said the other night that she liked to pack an adventure bag when she was young, which would have included a pair of binoculars and a book with soft pages she took from her grandmother's shelves. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam would garnish an adventure bag, no trouble. You could stop and read it under an apple tree somewhere.

THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE

Major turnout of my room throws up all kinds of jiggery-jaggery. THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE has been hiding among paper samples for the past few decades. Written by my sister, Ruth Mazet, whose life was more or less dedicated to horses. Her woe to the end of her life was that despite her best efforts, horses weren't enough. 

She makes abundant use of capital letters and letters in bold, the font is large and paper shiny. She always refers to the horse as he/him. I can hear her voice, and our mother's, their insistence when they were sure, which was often, plus the defiance to know otherwise. With barely a flick of the reins I can read it as the good Ruth guide. How much of her life, from foalhood to maturity, channelled through animals, is here, as if in reverse, in another language, another life.

With all the will in the world, things can, and often do, go wrong. If not understood and handled correctly, problem behaviour will usually go from bad to worse, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Here then, is a short summary of the most common problems, why they happen and what to do about them.

Oh! Oh! Oh! 

I have never googled my sister before. She wrote another book: My Horse Rears: Curing Problem Behaviour in Horses With Kindness and Consideration. And she had a website, horse-talk. Not much reading leaves me speechless, but this did.

DESERT & RIVER, men in their landscape

William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf has on the front cover a photograph of a pair of pugilists on shiny wet ground. A tale of a friendship that ends in a desert. Lymie Peters and Spud Latham, the athlete and the devout, thoughtful observer, each faithful in their own way, they complement each other until one day the egg has broken and they don't. Sally Forbes brings this about. 

The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense out of their lives.

Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It has on the front cover Brad Pitt on a rock casting a cursive loop over a tree-lit river. I have liked the phrase of his title for many years. I didn't know how he came by it, and didn't wonder enough to read the book, until now. I bought a copy from a bookshop in Jena, which arrived yesterday, and I read the title story yesterday and today, up at the pond and in the middle of the night. It's a thickly printed pocket book from 1992. The fly fisherman does not know the river, he becomes the river, and he becomes the river by knowing how the river was made, and knowing that it was made with fishermen in mind. 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Time Will Darken It

William Maxwell turns out to be the writer of the moment (reading desires are so precise sometimes); his carefulness, sense of justice, the way his chapters are born out of and interleave with each other, the distance in time, all this enfolds me, especially lying on the sofa in the new(ish) room with new eye(s), the cat on my feet, asleep, I do not want for anything except the summer I have agreed, for the afternoon, to forget.

Time Will Darken It was published in 1948, set in 1912, in a family house with a fractured couple just before a party, hairline cracks perhaps. Southern cousins come to stay, and a house, a marriage, a child, and myriad other substrates, are stirred to breaking point. The title is a quote from a 17th century painting manual. These sharp colours, sharp emotions, fulsome yet restrained dramas that skirt tragedy, they will darken. As certain books darken, deepen. Others, like one we were given recently and another that was left in the cabin, Francis Bacon's Nanny and Yellowface, will not. Francis Bacon darkens, but not an account of him by a reimagined nanny a hundred years later. I doubt the yellowface rant will darken either, it will simply deliquesce, like a slug under salt.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW

I was looking along the living room shelves, newly brightened, for some clear short tale for late july, and chose So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which I read up at the pond, between dunking in the dark water and maybe pulling out some water soldiers and bogbean and wondering why on earth, precisely, Florrie Heelan has to move his fields around so often with heavy machinery on quiet days in summer. William Maxwell is farmland/small town America, his Illinois rural and foreboding, accepting and at the same time evading. Acceptance a kind of evasion in its own right. 

My copy has pencil marks beside passages I liked the last time or the time before that. I find my former selves, old influences that have permeated, by now, and become part of my fabric. The child who says, So Long, See You Tomorrow, to his friend, is there on my current meadow, along with the lost furniture of his childhood, sofas, mahogany tables, pictures, big square books full of photographs that he knew by heart, that his fingers had absently traced.

If they hadn't disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, so Ortega Y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.

 

READING IN A BROODY SUMMER

Most evenings I read On Foot the Velvet Odyssey in its blurred carbon copy from 1978, trying to find the ancestor of my language and internal rhythms today. And then I read the first few pages as revised onto my computer this broody summer while listening to Beethoven or Schubert in the early evening, drizzly or the only gasp of sun that day. Then I read the update of Monday Night at Home, which I wrote twenty-five years ago, and now feel the need to say again in today's patois. I don't know why all this revisiting.

This afternoon, on the sofa in the new(ish) room, I read the New Yorker summer fiction issue and dozed into its tales. Here we all are, lurching into print, or out of blurred carbon copy. On foot the velvet odyssey reads as even older than it is, an England of summer fêtes and radio shops, all set into the frame of my adolescent withdrawal. Monday Night at Home reads as more like now, or fairly recently, when my language had caught up with me and I had caught up with the world.

Sebald & Bone the Dancer

This is a Sebald summer, I'll reread everything. After The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants. One of Sebald's emigrants is Paul Bereyter, an ideal teacher, if you could have one, who brought his children on his own quest, outdoors as often as possible.The great thing about rereading books is how the complexities build, your own and the writer's, and some of them turn into music.   

... Paul told me that as a child he had once his summer holidays in Lindau, and had watched from the shore every day as the train trundled across from the mainland to the island and from the island to the mainland. The white clouds of stem in the blue air, the passengers waving from the windows, the reflection in the water — this spectacle, repeated at intervals, so absorbed him that he never once appeared on time at the dinner table all that holiday, a lapse that his aunt responded to with a shake of the head that a grew more resigned every time, and his uncle with the comment that he would end up on the railways.

Paul Bereyter ended up purposefully lying on the railway tracks, a good choice of death for a claustrophobic. Sebald is so good at partly redeemed sadness. 

Circa 1978 I wrote On Foot the Velvet Odyssey, the strange non-tale of Bone the dancer, his town, his being, and how he drew them, their voices, their footfall, all of them and their dead, into Wyse's Meadow for a grand finale. I looked at it again in 2022, and transcribed the first few pages onto the computer from a blurred carbon copy sent to a friend who kindly returned it, without comment, I think. What happened to the top copy I don't know. Then, in 2024,  Jack the dancer from Australia came here looking for earth; he brought some spare of his own, in case, and found he was already in a novel since before he was born, before his nickname was Bones or he knew about loss, or earth. He stayed in our cabin for two weeks and realised he'd been here all along. What happens in your novel, he asked. I've come ten thousand miles to find myself in a novel, I need to know. I have been looking, Jack, to see what happens. It may take some time.

SCHERRY SHI

There's an election in your country today, said M. with a certain sharpness.

It isn't my country, I said, and you can't decide for me. 

You're British and you always will be, she went on.

No, I never felt British. My country is the place where I've dug and planted. Where I've nested. 

Scherry Shi was born in China, lives in London, her parents are in New Zealand; she is thinking about these things in a more immediate way than I am. You could see it in the way she moved between the tables at the book fair where we met her.  She made a small book called departure, of softened photographs and some text. Departure /from air /from soil /from water

...  I could not stop thinking of my homes, which I depart from, which I return to, of those within me, of those away from me; of those above the earth, of those on the ground.

Home is where I was, where I am and where I may be in the future.

Reading Sebald in bed, talking to M in the morning, working in the veg plot in the afternoon, looking at Scherry Shi's book in the evening.

Herzog is the voice of Sebald

I was reading Sebald up at the pond  — I'm halfway into The Rings of Saturn, his journey down the east coast of england — and the voice of Werner Herzog came through. We watched his film about the practice, the business, in Japan of actors standing in for missing relatives, a father, for example. So Werner and Max (Sebald was Max to his friends) meet up at the pond on the warmest afternoon this year. In the half-light of East Anglia, where I grew up, Max is plugging for home, but along the way he excursions with Conrad to the Congo, second-longest river in the world, and to China with a miniature railway engine fetched up in Lowestoft, Suffolk, and lastly the propeller plane from Amsterdam back to Norwich. Werner lives in Los Angeles. He is all over the world, as far away as mind and body can go, he is up on deck, a slight smile on his face, interrogative, explanatory, quiet. In both voices, Werner's and Max's, there is the soft german sense of offering, of willingness, Max's more learned, yet quizzical, as he makes his way down the east coast of England, Werner's — and this is film, not the page — more benign compère. The modern german voice does not want to impose, but is so pleased to reveal. I was reading Max and I could hear Werner. The hawker dragonfly is here again. And the electric blue darter. Small frogs are assimilating into the pondside and beyond.

A COMMON PARADISE

The Garden Against Time, IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE by Olivia Laing, who is restoring a garden in Suffolk, reading Thomas More, Thomas Browne, John Clare, W.G. Sebald, William Morris, Derek Jarman, and making an argument for the commons, for the commonality of land, the primacy of land in our lives. 

I read the first half very fast, then a pause, then the last two sections up at the pond today, with intermittent sun and very small frogs, much smaller than their late tadpole state, it seemed, hopping in and out of the pond. 

Olivia Laing's book made me think about what we're doing here, our moves towards commonality. People come here and walk about and help. 'It's almost offensively stunning', said Jack the dancer from Australia, who's staying in the cabin, after his first walkabout last week at the champagne hour, early evening. 'It's like a dream', said Jyeung from South Korea. Inspiring. Paradise. Several people  have said.  Paradise is offensively stunning. Why? 

Olivia Laing answers that question to some degree.

RUNNING WITH THE RAMSAYS

I read To the lighthouse for epiphanies, up at the pond last week, for recognition and comfort, and then, unwilling to let it go, start reading the book again at night. Around and beneath the epiphanies, Mrs Ramsay wrestles with the question of rich and poor, Lily Briscoe, out in the garden with her easel and her painting—that reddish brown patch is Mrs Ramsay at the window knitting woollen stockings for the lighthouse keeper's boy— wrestles with Mr Ramsay's idea of reality which seems to be summed up by a plain deal table upside down in a tree. Mr Ramsay is a tyrant looking for sympathy. Mrs Ramsay can only rest when her youngest is asleep. Children remember everything, she says. An hour later, still awake, I try to remember the names of the eight Ramsay children, in pairs and singly, Jasper and Rose, Andrew and Prue, James and Cam. This borrowed family gathers other borrowed families as it goes along, other recessive guests, called Lily, William, Augustus, with their half-eaten internal dramas in the manner of Tchekov, Kurt Lippa for example, who grew up in Macau and played ferocious table tennis, loved Schubert and bel canto, an Austrian Jew who— 

Nocturnal reading is a parallel world, parallel and permeable. Reading Virginia Woolf up at the pond in June is not the same as reading her at night, a second time. Last week it was part of a bigger rhythm. The second time, every line is particular, my rest places are different: Mr and Mrs Ramsay, the eight children, the summer house on Skye. How Virginia Woolf refashioned her family into this book, ran with them again. This is what you have to do, what writing is for. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF, summer

Yesterday in the New Yorker I read Anthony Lane on Blinkist, the app for people who don't want to read the whole book. Most of the books on Blinkist are on how to survive/make billions. So many books on self-improvement, how to deal with this or that. Maybe Blinkist is giving these books what they deserve. They also reduce Jane Austen, Wittgenstein, John Milton. What do they deserve?

Today I read Virginia Woolf up at the pond.  To the Lighthouse. This was where I wanted to be. Reading sentences and paragraphs as they were written at a particular time by a particular person, V. Woolf in the afternoon, with her roll-ups and her writing board, finding her Moments. By late afternoon, not quite sunny but warm, more than halfway through the book, I can read the way a horse can break into a run, the way a cat can while away the time on warm liscannor stones, what I'm reading is an equivalence of where I am. To the lighthouse and the surface of the pond, the plants around it, the changing sky, the dreams I had last night and the night before, Mrs Ramsay coming to herself after the children have gone to bed, Lily Briscoe in and out of her painting, Mr Ramsay tying the laces on his beautiful boots — he had a way of tying laces so they never came undone — his wife's astonishing beauty, beautiful phrases, beautiful pictures, shadows in the fruit bowl, as long as no one wanted a pear, the astonishing beauty of the pond.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything.

I asterisked that passage many years ago. What is the difference between a Blink and a Moment? Do you play your days like a piano or trust the algorithm? The blackbird has a bath in the pond. A couple of planes go over. North wind. They come this way when there's a wind from the north. 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF READING

 

                LETTER L

                Selborne, April 21st, 1780

DEAR SIR,

                The old Sussex tortoise, that I have mentioned to you so often, is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in March last, when it was enough awakened to express its resentments by hissing; and, packing it in a box with earth, carried it eighty miles in post-chaises. The rattle and hurry so roused it that, when it turned out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden; however, in the evening, the weather being cold, it buried itself in the loose mould and continues still concealed.

I am nearing the end of The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White, my nocturnal book for the past few weeks. Apparently Gilbert White did not enjoy coach journeys, and took days afterwards to recover. Maybe the tortoise did too. The tortoise is more ancient than humanity. Sleep may be the key.

When one reflects on the state of this strange being, it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than half of its existence in joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.

Gilbert White was mainly interested in birds, but he also recounts other creatures, insects, the weather and labourers' wages, quotes latin and greek as among friends. Nature is his language; swallows, swifts and martins are his dialect, the letter his natural form. He was convinced that swallows did not go south in winter but withdrew some few hundred yards to a sheltered spot. A natural history always includes some wishful thinking.

UNE IMAGE PEUT-ETRE VRAIE

I like the french title une image peut-être vraie better than the english, Alex Cléo Roubaud, a portrait in fragments. The english brings out frenchness, not french, nor Alex Cléo Roubaud — her full name, her photos, her notebooks and letters — more the neutral catalogue quality that Hélène Giannechini brings to her appraisal of a short life in words and pictures, like a laying out, a door closing in great detail.

I'm well-placed to read her on a changeable afternoon in May, but I don't want to. An old unwillingness to recognise what I know best, creeps over me on the sofa in the new room, the cat asleep not far away, a few heavy showers, thunder yesterday, peppers planted out, borlotti beans started. 

A penultimate page entitled (BLACK) shows a photograph of six window panes and a cord-pull with a driveway, lawns, a belt of trees.

Let's pull the cord, hide the last photograph from view. I'll leave Alix's memory there. I wanted to write between the pieces of evidence. An account has emerged. Memories are words, and archives are documents.

       Fleshing Alix out in fiction was not my intention; I worked in the interstices between the traces of her that remain.

        This is not a photograph of Allix's life, but fragments of her work; scattered shards.

        A picture that may be true.

The Sylph Editions translation by Thea Petrou, ends with a letter to Hélène Giannechini. 

Making then, not taking. Through your wandering into the lexical fields of memory, action painting, dance, bullfighting, medicine and eroticism, I have followed Alix's processes in the darkroom and observed the imposition of her own physicality — a performance — on the film. And now I see the pictures, what they are made of.

    Thank you, Hélène.