THE LURE OF THE SENTENCE

 From Virginia Woolf losing hairpins along Piccadilly, to Gerald Murnane of Inner, Outer and Other Australia, The Plains, the sentence has the structure of home, endlessly running on even as it stands still. 

Every few pages of The Plains, there's some or another thing — to use one of Gerald Murnane's favourite phrases —that brings you to a halt.

"And then the door from the street was flung open and a new group of plainsmen came in from the dazzling sunlight with their afternoon's work done and settles themselves at the bar to resume their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth."

It's ghostly reading Gerald Murnane as a blow-in in Ireland. His scrutiny of the plains (he doesn't like the definite article in titles) which he doesn't know except through the prowess of his imagination, includes Ireland. What a roundabout route to find out where you live. An Irish-Australian, or Australian-Irish, at his typewriter, looking for the plains, the plain of his imagination.

Here is our narrator learning to assimilate in a bar:

"They were all in a condition that I had expected to reach myself after a few more pots of beer. They had lost little of their customary dignity. Perhaps they spoke a trifle too emphatically or gestured too readily. As I understood it from my own experiences with alcohol, they had drunk themselves sober."

We were in a pub overnight in North Kerry some years ago. We'd gone to look into a per cent for art project and happened on a funeral, stayed the night.The family were in extremis: 'I'm so drunk I'm coming round to being sober again,' said the daughter, thin, black-haired, late on in the evening. We saw her next morning, wigless, pale and bereft.

I finished The Plains and started it again a few days later. 

READING THE ORDNANCE SURVEY

After I came back from my home turf on the essex coast, I got out a 1980s ordnance survey map and read it like the book of my past, for some time. It was the names of farms that got me, their tracks down to the estuary—Lauriston Farm, Joyce's Farm—which I walked with the certainty of escape when I was fourteen or so; and the names of villages I knew from signposts on foot, on my bike. To revisit a place you knew on foot and on a bike, only, to whizz through in a car and catch a name—Langford Place—Ulting—was to catch my breath on behalf of former selves. The ordnance survey graphic for the sea wall is poignant. I ponder the fact of having grown up behind sea walls, having dreamt of walking them, endlessly. They are now, I learn, relaxing sea walls where they have degraded, letting the flood tides in. 

LAST LETTER TO A READER

I began Gerald Murnane's Last Letter to a Reader with a sense of relief, as one coming into the home passage, not walking nor sinking, knowing the way. These are sentences that carry me, even if, by the time I am halfway through the book I am a little tired of finding myself in this writing fabric, his, and also, with hardly a twitch of the tale, mine as well. I have always had a ready diffidence where words are concerned. The levelness, evenness of Gerald Murnane's account of his writing and reading self, eventually gets to me; and I would rather watch a movie.

Re-reading Pavese straightaway

The House on the Hill sounds so homey/inappropriate you forget the title until you start reading the book again. Re-reading is for pause times. Every other day is so wet you can float off, no trouble. Pavese's house on the hill is embedded in world war two. It is temporary, fragile, freighted, has two landladies and a dog, Belbo, several pasts and theatres (of war), domestic habits still in place. Food is prepared, crops harvested and provisions made, magazzini stocked, expectations nurtured. Turin, below, is on fire. Then teaching resumes. What does our narrator teach? Does he teach the house on the hill, the bar Le Fontane where the partisans meet, the child Dino, old girlfriend Cate. What is a partisan?

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

The long and the short of it, in 1940s novels from Brooklyn and Piedmont, Italy.

The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which took several weeks to read, in the insomniac hours. Reading a 1940s bestseller takes the place of sleep. The growing tree, mentioned at judicious intervals, is ailanthus or tree of heaven; enough said. 

The short is The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese, which I'm halfway through in a day. The house on the hill is outside Turin in 1943, wartime; enough said. I have read other Pavese and recognise these houses, these hills, these women, his ghosts; perpetual edginess that the war confirms.

This is an ungainly tango. Forget blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Betty Smith and Cesare Pavese are more serendipitous, less felicitous. I can read a bestseller from 1944 and not a bestseller from 2025 (sauf a Graham Norton novel a couple of years ago; special pleading there). I like slim Italian literature from the 1940s and 1950s, much of it written by depressives. With a fascist state in your history, you're barely able to look ahead.

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

I stubbed my toe on the wood box in the night and so was laid up for the day, which was all wind and sugar as they used to say. I read The End of Me by Alfred Hayes end to end beside the stove and was well pleased. The limping slowed me down. After my visit to Essex I had a whole geophysical childhood to absorb. Reading someone else's tale can oil your own.

I have read two other novels by Alfred Hayes. Less novels than trajectories — I have always had trouble saying that word — poem hardly easier — and Alfred Hayes has a poetic trajectory. He makes for the end of himself with plenty ellipses so that you end at the last chapter at last light, spent as he is. 

BATS IN OCTOBER

A bat flew by outside, through the gingko and the service tree. I was thinking about Barbara Pym and then Betty Smith, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn which was my sleep inducer before I went to London and Essex, book fair and woods and marshes of origin, respectively. I left Betty Smith at home and took with me Quartet in Autumn; I was midway before I left so maybe in Stockwell and in Boreham, Essex, I could bed down in the mid-twentieth century according to Barbara Pym. Her quartet of people work in the same office, the two women retire first, the two men look on and discuss the women, who do not discuss the men, or anything, with each other: one is solo eccentric, entrenched, her garden shed full of milk bottles; the other, timid, pliant, settles onto the shifting tide. 

Back home, exhausted, full of the past, I could not think who was who in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But that doesn't matter.

poetry this summer

Since soundeye in July I have read poetry as the start of the working day, that is, five o'clock in the afternoon onwards listening to Don Giovanni or Schubert. Mairead Byrne, Randolph Healy, Fergal Gaynor. Later Peter Manson came by post. We are Mallarmé confederates.

I remembered Anne Carson's Plainwater which I first read in the pink room upstairs at the Beckett Atelier looking over the Seine, drinking choco tea and writing my diary at length. 

Then Lena Tsykynovska came to stay in the cabin, from Odessa via Boston and Chicago. She was sure there must be a poetry bookshop in Dublin if not in Cork. I gave her a cucumber in the greenhouse and she bit the end off straightaway like a character in Tchekov.

Si la beauté n'était la mort was one of my favourite Mallarmé lines.

I told Lena about the old man who lived up at the reservoir and didn't know if it was beautiful or not. Many people are uneasy with beauty, I said. 

One way or another I have been driving through beauty and her acolytes this summer. I have caught my breath and run on as best I can through differing fracture and dispersal. This selection of the day and night. Your concerns, your reading, your innerness, your onwardness, your trepidation, loss, your breakfast.

The face of Mallarmé on the cover of the September 22nd New Yorker is calm, thoughtful, wrapped and ribboned. M. Kalman finds a thinner younger Mallarmé than the plaid suggests. Halfway to Proust perhaps. 

PARTY GOING

Henry Green liked his present participles, the borrowed present of his writing is what he's constantly moving towards, pausing at, giving up at. The book ends when the present participle snaps.

Party Going was the first of his books I read, and the one I go back to when I want to spend time at Victoria Station in a mid-twentieth century fog. This time it was the pull back moment, fifty pages from the end, when Henry Green/Yorke is aloft in a railway station considering the party he has assembled, that gave me pause in the middle of the night, which is mostly when I have been reading lately.

Two hundred pages in he pauses. The taut bright young things with their cabin trunks their exhaustive dealings, their people guarding. The train station has become a living being. That's where Henry Green weighs in.

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.

  This is what I'm waiting for in words and in music.

So crowded together they were beginning to be pressed against each other, so close that every breath had been inside another past that lipstick or those cracked lips, those even teeth, loose dentures, down into other lungs, so weary, so desolate and cold it silenced them.

 What do you say then?

You want the moon, said Edwards.

Henry Green Remembers

Henry Green wrote a memoir Pack My Bag on the eve of world war two: he was convinced he would die and he wanted to die up to date, having said it in so many words. I like his sentences; they keep you awake. Like Gertrude Stein but slightly more punctuation. Halting. Lurching. Tense & lyrical.

As we listen to what we remember, to the echoes, there is no question but the notes are muted, that those long introductions to the theme life is to be, so strident so piercing at the time are now no louder than the cry of a huntsman on the hill a mile or so away when he views the fox. We who must die soon, or so it seems to me, should chase our memories back, standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be too near what they once meant. Like the huntsman, on a hill and when he blows his horn, like him some way away from us.

Some way away, is right. Henry Green felt far away. At his private school, his public school, at Oxford. You can be isolated from anything. Let's agree to agree.

The Reading Trail

Spending a couple of weeks at home on my own, I read as if maintaining a necessary substrate: with meals, between meals, before sleep, during insomnia. I have read two novellas by Henry James, three novels by Muriel Spark and her autobiography, whose evocation of publishing in postwar Britain led to Diana Athill's memoir Stet, which is about the same thing, and may in turn, through its chapter on Jean Rhys, take me back to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Entrenched in my own life, weather and upkeep, I need these versions of elsewhere, the parallel existence of other people. And I need it to be written. Novels write it, poems write it, memoirs write about it. Diaries take the plunge, eyes closed. All good. 

Diana Athill writes about Jean Rhys, and how, in her last years, she struggled to finish Wide Sargasso Sea. She could hardly speak but she could see the words she wanted to add. The pages of the novel had a physical photovoltaic existence, including all future amendments.

Muriel Spark read Henry James

I'd been reading Henry James and switched to Muriel Spark who also read Henry James, and, in Loitering With Intent, pulls herself up short for writing something Henry James would have written. She steers her writing passage through all she has read and all she has lived. She's abrasive and cool, if not nasty. Switched from being jew-ish to full Roman Catholicism. She was my parents' generation. They talked about Memento Mori with their friends circa 1960 — a novel in which everyone dies — with an excited contemporaneity beyond my emotional age. I took note. I re-read Muriel Spark rarely enough to forget the plots and often enough to know how this kind of wryness works, where she is in relation to what she writes, how she digs and evades. She's there all the time, that's for sure. The hand of Muriel is on yours from the start.

Henry James & Mahler

First The Spoils of Poynton then What Maisie Knew. As always with Henry James a materiality — the spoils of Poynton are priceless therefore must ultimately go up in smoke — and a bottomless enquiry. What poor dear Maisie knows is bottomless. She has two mothers two fathers and two governesses. As far as family can be stretched, she stretches it in her mind's eye: who is lying, who is afraid of whom and why, who will vanish or transform next. Now a governess then a stepmother.

Always an excess of love amid the sundering and reshaping of protofamilies. Life is for constant unpicking as it happens: is this Mr Merriam or Lord Eric or the Count or the Captain. Who will the next father be. What of the battle to be Maisie's mother.

Is it possible to write about reading Henry James without writing like Henry James.

While listening to Janet Baker sing Mahler songs.

Letters to her daughter, Madame de Sévigné

I have few leather-bound gilded books, and only the letters of Madame de Sévigné were a gift, not made directly to me, but at one remove. A friend of my mother's had a maiden aunt in Paris, whom I visited once. She may have been called Miss Hogan, and she lived in the longest street in Paris, the rue de Vaugirard. I was twenty, and shy. She was in her seventies, and served a formal tea. After she died, a few years later, my mother's friend suggested I might like the Madame de Sévigné volume, as well as three large linen pillowcases. I was, and am still touched that my mother's friend, whose children I babysat when I was a teenager, thought I was a candidate for linen pillowcases and seventeenth century letters. But she judged well. The pillowcases are in use on the sofa in the new room where we sometimes read or nap in summer. 

I have read Madame de Sévigné a few times. This time, in this in-between season, has been perhaps the most poignant. I have relished the firmly vertical Didot font and the thick pages, unevenly cut and difficult to turn, which made my reading even slower and more careful. It's many years since I was in the habit of reading french this old, but I made my way into it, not worrying when there were phrases I didn't quite understand. It was a relief to feel at this distance from the intimate though formal speech of a seventeenth century aristocrat. Perhaps even the formality, the past historic tenses correctly used, the words I no longer knew, brought this mother's longing to be with her daughter into even sharper focus. The mother lived in the north of France, the daughter in Provence. Even a journey from Brittany to Paris took many days.

We were in Cork a few days ago, meeting our new cabin guest. As she waited for her bag to be unloaded from the bus, we watched a mother-daughter reunion, the long hug and tears of joy, the slight pull back now and then as they looked at each other after long absence, maybe the summer, maybe longer.

 

Madame de Sévigné in Peru

My mother liked The Bridge of San Luis Rey but I didn't till now. It sounded real and that wasn't what I was looking for when I was growing up. Now, many years later, and twenty, maybe, since my mother died, I pull it out of the shelves, fourteenth printing of 1928, Bloomsburyish loose cover and wide, chalky pages, and it turns out to be what I need to underpin my shaky nights.

Five people fall to their death when an ancient rope bridge collapses in Peru. Father Juniper undertakes to find out who they were and maybe assert the justice of their death, or situate death such that the reader might ponder. The seventeenth century tone — think Madame de Sévigné's letters to her daughter — except in this case the daughter did not love her mother — au contraire — is seductive in the middle of the night. This is just the reading I need.  

Aberration by Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino

There has been a lurch towards the 1970s and 1980s, some of the nether regions of my bookshelves. I had not looked for a long time at Douglas Woolf or Gilbert Sorrentino, and I wonder why. Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide Hotel, a pleasing rambling take on Rimbaud's 'Voyelles', I did read many times, sometimes out loud in class, when I was teaching. I haven't felt ready for Mulligan Stew after the first read; it is immensely long and prefaced by the many rejection letters it generated. I also haven't gone back to Joyce. Nor I think, will I. So much reading swirls around early zeal, and so much zeal does not find a future.  

Aberration by Starlight is a charming title for a short book published in a Penguin American Fiction list in 1980. Though formally innovative, with chapters of different styles and viewpoints circulating around a father/his daughter/her son/her would be lover, it is somehow only that. Or: the excesses and stylisation of all the characters, charmless as they must be in the eyes of all the others, is such that this reader does not want to hear another take in another chapter. Though, being cursed with diligence, I read to the end, just in case the formal experiment relents into a human place to rest and take human breath.

fade out by Douglas Woolf

Bought in 1981, as per my inscription, perhaps not read since, and from the start I know why. It's relentlessly external and not quite picaresque, the reverse of an adventure: Mr Twombly, Dick, leaves Cynthia, his tortoise and Kate his daughter and her family and the home they put him in, for a life on the road, towards Phoenix Arizona, with Ed Behemoth, ex-pugilist. The best thing is that they fetch up in the hotel of an abandoned town a hundred miles from Phoenix. They'll set up the hotel again, shelter other vagrants like their younger selves.

I'd rather watch a movie, find myself in a recently abandoned hotel; this isn't reading, it's cantering through a semi-peopled landscape. That's why the hotel is a relief.

Antiquities & The Patients All Seemed Happy

Cynthia Ozick in her mid-nineties takes on the Petrie family, specifically Sir Flinders Petrie, Egyptologist, and a long-closed school, now inhabited by ageing trustees, the youngest of whom, our narrator, is a Petrie cousin, once a pupil at the school. The focus of Antiquities is the friendship between Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie and another pupil called Ben-Zion Elefantin, who comes from Elephantine Island in the Nile and is as mysterious as his name. So do the creatures of this novella intertwine. Literally, shadowy, at one point.

I have plenty of patience with high language and erudition. There's something peaceful about having departed the usual narrative realm. My own life seems to lurch among extremes of human life, I can take refuge in tales like this one, whose main strength is in unresolved airing of past events. I've read most if not all of Cynthia Ozick's earlier books. 

Cynthia Ozick is a climb at first; though eventually I was cruising on all I'd never know about the Petrie men and Ben-Zion Elefantin, then I was ready for The Patients All Seemed Happy by Lianne O'Hara some thirty pages of realigned language from the archive of Grangegorman, for a hundred years the biggest mental hospital in Ireland. Grangegorman is now the campus of the Technological University of Dublin. 

They are not sure where to put me. /Hunger is no excuse for larceny. 

I tell them I am with child and push /out my belly on the exhale.

No one believes a lunatic.

          The floors shine with effort and soap. /My mouth is inspected for foul language

          but I show them nothing. / Strange hands fondle my stomach.

(Still in doubt, I think.) 

           The walls are cold and smooth. /I hear the echo of a voice:

            The majority of those seeking discharge were unfit cases. 

                      I wonder if I am an unfit case. 

Edith's Diary, My Diary

It's a while since I read a page-turner where things were going to get worse; you know from the dull start in New Jersey/Pennsylvania in the 1960s, Edith's Diary will be a lie. Edith's life continues to split off from Edith's diary. Her 100% dreadful son, in her diary is an engineering hero with a lovely wife and child near Princeton, New Jersey. Her husband leaves her for a younger woman, whom he eventually marries, and has a daughter with. Meanwhile Edith, as her diary sharpens into fresh fantasies, sculpts the head of her son in plasticine and joins him, little by little, in delinquency.

This is Patricia Highsmith. It will get worse.  

DAILY LIVING

When I sit in a café I sit in the lineage of all other cafés I have known. I should sit at least once a week in the quiet season, as it is now, and read Gertrude Stein on Paris France. Her plain speech clears the raddled head like a large glass of very fresh cool water. I don't think Gertrude Stein was ever raddled.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature. 

 And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way had to be found naturally they needed France.

Really not, french people really do not believe that anything is important except daily living and ground that gives it to them and defending themselves from the enemy. Government has no importance except insofar as it does that.

Gertrude is perhaps, in her time, in her freshness, what my friend Pete Lyle calls haute fuck. It was 1940 and she was able to say Paris was exciting and peaceful. She had lived there since 1903.

As the rain pours down for the first time in months I am fully doused in what the ground gives to me. It takes a pot of gold to raise a rainbow, as Randolph Healy says; maybe have a shot / at a language with no present or future. I open The best of (what's left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne a time or two in the day. —Quiet, I know what it is. It is a human hand.

At night I've been reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse. So much plot and impersonation and machination you cease to care who is doing what to whom, and ride a chapter or two in the early hours.

When you get to know Pongo better, said Lord Ickenham, you will realize that he is always like this — moody, sombre, full of doubts and misgivings. Shakespeare drew Hamlet from him. You will feel better, my boy, when you have had a drink. Let us nip round to my club and get a swift one. 

Days and Nights with Aldo Buzzi

Aldo Buzzi wears his knowledge lightly, he comes to land lightly too, on what he chooses to tell. He's an architect as well as a writer, but doesn't write of architecture, more of food, and travel, and the life that is open to those who have the freedom to look. Journey to the Land of the Flies begins with one of my favourite things.

I stayed for some time in the lovely Villa Musco, near the village of Spartà, in Sicily, not far from Messina. I had been given a beautiful bedroom, with great, transparent curtains at the windows which swelled slowly in the breeze filtering between the wooden slats of the open shutters and kept out the flies and mosquitoes that are seldom absent from earthly paradises.

In a self-interview in A Weakness for Almost Everything, he describes his ideal house.

I prefer a house in the city, surrounded by a garden that faces on one side the main street and on the other the sea or the country. It's a house that doesn't exist. This house should also look out on a solitary meadow where a donkey, a calf and a chicken are feeding. Plus a dog, a cat, and a couple of blackbirds.

I need the leisure of someone else's pictures, tastes that coincide with mine but elsewhere. A net curtain billowing not far from Messina, a villa in the land of the flies, and at the same time in Tenby, a guest house on the way back to Ireland one year. On Tenby beach, on Saturday, I ate a peach.

I have been reading some of the Coloured Books in order to read a selection out loud, amid a tribe of poets in a former bakery, upstairs in Shandon Street, on Saturday.

Aldo Buzzi (pronounced Bootsie) mistrusts any book that doesn't mention food.

 

SEVEN APPLES (MORE)

The kind of reading that leads to re-writing is shifty and robust: something is already there on the page, but every word and line is mutable, on its way and willing. I have been re-reading my 8 pages on apples, rearranging their boxes, text boxes, that is, on the 8 pages and at the back of my brain. I read in fits and starts, pushing the pages around like bread dough. Or throwing them up in the air, mentally, and waiting to see how the history of apples as I understand it looks next day. Eventually they all go quiet.

A perfectly good coma

I took Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley up to the pond, and read a few pages of the title story before coming to a halt at this phrase: 'A perfectly good coma, wrecked by nightmares'. I have come to a halt on this page before. Her defiant common sense brings me as much peace as a Mozart piano sonata. I put the book down and closed my eyes in the sun. I wonder if my mother had nightmares when she was in her end of life coma. Grace Paley brings me often to stupefied recognition: her vehemence, right-mindedness, her language plucked from every recess of her life at the pace of her life. This time I liked 'Faith in a Tree' and 'Faith in the Afternoon' best. 

In The New York Review of Books I read a piece about Marcel Proust and his jewishness, or not. Strange to come in on him like this, up at the pond, alongside Grace Paley, and her jewishness, and mine. So there we are, on a fine day, the three of us pulling duckweed out of the pond with a net, reading some more, lying back, then going for a dip.

Women Talking: England & New York

The fifth Elizabeth Bowen novel in my recent run was The Little Girls, one of the talkiest of her novels. Even taking into account my weakened, flu-ish state these past days, I struggled to stay with the little girls and the women they became. They had nicknames, which doesn't help the reader's focus. Clare was Mumbo and Sheila was Sheikie and Diana was Dicey. Their concerns revolve around a coffer they buried in the grounds of their school when they were eleven or twelve, containing unnamed objects they each chose, to be discovered by someone in the future, and a new iteration of this in a kind of cave near Dicey's (Diana's, now Dinah's) home. There's great emphasis on houses and their objects, and much discomfort around emotions: talk blurs rather than reveals, so much so that I found myself only imagining these women in their settings and taking no interest in who they were or had been. I kept imagining Elizabeth Bowen in her society — polite yet wilful, almost eccentric but not quite — and in her house in North Cork, visited by various culturati and relatives or near-relatives, a society that knew itself but did not warm the cockles of anyone's heart. I started to read the book again to see if these women and their objects would come clear, but gave up after a few chapters. 

Grace Paley, on the other hand, in the last of her three collections of stories, Later the Same Day, plunges me from the first sentence into groups of friends in a time and a place, mid-twentieth century and New York. Not only are these women talking to each other, there is no style in the stories other than the talking style. Here is a writer who talked life into being, who talked relationships and politics in the voices she had heard all her life. She pulls writing into the world she knows. Elizabeth Bowen pulls the world she knows into writing. Neither is a world I know firsthand, but Grace Paley's is the one I'm drawn to, the one I almost envy, perhaps because her jewishness makes the lifelong attachments and warm humanity she writes about seem viscerally close to who I am, or at any rate who I might have been. Others have talked about families where vehement discussion about politics was the norm, where real concern transmuted into action and consensus.

Last night, in the last story in Later the Same Day, I read, twice, startled each time, the word intelligentsia. When did I last read/hear/say that word? Probably never said it; it would have seemed at least presumptuous. Now practically seditious, or just irrelevant. An end of night dream brought it into focus. A large room, full but spacious, lots of tables, people eating or talking or reading or writing. I considered for a while which table to choose: one that would let me eavesdrop or join in the conversation, or one where I could write, and think, and daydream. I think I chose the latter.

A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen at home, more or less

A girl wearing a muslin dress she found in a trunk in the attic, goes out to look at the landscape wearing it, diffusing at the end of a hot summer. Later she finds a packet of love letters which she hides under a stone beneath an elder bush, and her younger sister finds and so we all come to understand something but not everything. Every time you learn something —who the letters were to, for example — you feel immediately you didn't need to know, you just needed to step outside in a muslin dress in north county cork, early twentieth century, and sense the summer ending.  

strangeness at the end of may

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Children all askew, often sad, and aside, long-legged girls and young women shift from place to place for obscure reasons, strong compulsions run amok, they're observant, these long-legged girls and young women, as you need to be if you live on shifting sands. Dodging what? With a view to what? Her teacher Miss Smith asks Eva Trout, age sixteen, newly arrived at the school, if 'here' seemed strange still. Eva replies 'Anywhere would seem strange that did not'.

All Elizabeth Bowen's girl creatures can relate to this. The wayward English chill and freedom, hairpins flying, as with Virginia Woolf. I too can get there in a trice. The pleasure of pinning strangeness to the page, this is the locus, the focus, of reading as the season shifts.

 

French houses with novels passing through: William Maxwell and Elizabeth Bowen

An American couple are paying guests in a château in the Touraine after the war; their french is poor, they bring nylon stockings to give to the cook and the maid; they know not what to expect but they're willing for anything, and curious about this battered France, her codes, her closed core, her fictions and disclosures. How can you ever know what happened in this house, around it, through it, however bereft you will be to leave, you will leave, and later write a book about it. Not being rude. Being thorough, and observant, polite and contained, willing, apologetic, curious, always.

Two children wait in the house in Paris in the 1930s, one for a mother the other for a train; the train arrives and the mother doesn't. Waiting, in transit, makes you observant. 

A woman came out with a tray of mimosa and the raw daylight fell on the yellow pollen: but for that there might have been no sky. 

The Château by William Maxwell, and The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen. Two french buildings with novels inside them. This is how I pass the days. After The House in Paris I read The Death of the Heart. The days are cooler, windy, with rain, more incision than blessing.

 

Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad

An article in The New Yorker about Mark Twain sent me to the bedroom bookshelves to see what I had. Tom Sawyer was too big a volume for outdoor reading and A Life on the Mississippi or A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur too decayed to be disturbed. The article characterised America as half-grown, like Huck Finn. I chose The Innocents Abroad. 

Innocents Abroad were innocents indeed. Or Mark Twain is a careless showman feeding an eager audience. My undated, pirated edition from London, a pinched hardback look, tight print occasionally blurry, especially at the bottom of the page. The innocents, rich enough to pay a thousand dollars for this bash into the unknown: over the bumpy Atlantic, stopping at the Azores, and then Gibraltar, Tangiers, France, Italy, a disparate group constantly off on side-trips to Paris, London or Switzerland, reconvening in Genoa, on to Rome. 

I watched The Talented Mr Ripley the other night: more innocents abroad, rich innocents. Wealth does bring a kind of innocence; there's so much you don't see when you're rich. You travel under R, and that's just the beginning of the false pretences.

I enjoyed Mark Twain at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at Versailles, where he marvelled at the precision that made up the general effect of the clipped trees. Then he's on to Milan, gazing at The Last Supper, telling his readers what they're supposed to think and undermining them. He's a digester of culture; as he raises a masterpiece he drops it.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand—and more especially I cannot understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depôts and such marvels of turnpikes. Why, these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line as smooth as a floor, and as white as snow.

 Then Venice. 

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they battled ... the Autocrat of Commerce ... Mother of Republics ...

He stayed at the Grand Hotel d'Europe. The talented Mr Ripley rents a palazzo. Then Rome. Mark Twain is a digester. Reader's Digest. We last see Mr Ripley on a boat to Greece, travelling under R.

what if there is no story

Her side of the story by Alba de Céspedes, mid 20th century Italy, the anti-fascist sector. I became impatient with her side of the story, and indeed his. Halfway through I found I was galloping. I only wanted to know what happened and I didn't even want that.

Instead I read Steps by Maurice Scully, late 20th century Ireland, Lesotho, Italy, early 2lst.

Nothing is nothing. I am the perfect citizen.

Finitude is rubbish, everybody knows that.

No wonder the secret police are busy. Phone me

(to lie in bed Understanding Poetry) phone me

when you get back 

DANCING FLIES

I finished Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane, read the first few pages again, then watched the dancing flies above the pond, buffeted now and then by a northeast breeze whenever the sun went behind a cloud; the massed flies buffeting, in their turn, the whirligig beetles. You stand more chance of following a whirligig beetle than a dancing fly, if you can choose one dancing fly in the thick of the dance. 

Dancing flies — their real name — do not bite, do not land, they dance, and now and then concede to the breeze. I look into them, trying to choose one and happily fail as they swing southwest in a rush of billows.

For some days I've been thinking what I'd like to say about reading Gerald Murnane, his phrases/places that are his points de repère and the impetus of reading him. Those small bursts of wind that seem to confer order, or rhythm, or conviction, among the dancing flies, bring his writing, his reading/writing/remembering, into just the right not quite focus.