Flannery O'Connor

Dug over two or three beds in the veg plot; ground very dry and hard; hitting thick sods may be of a piece with reading the stories of Flannery O'Connor, several hundred pages of making your way towards death or other disaster. The end of each story is such a plunge I have to wait, if not plunge myself, into our pond.

Flannery kept peacocks; she lived with her mother on the family farm called Andalusia, in Georgia; ill with lupus, an awkward woman in her photos, her stories are the inside lupus voice, wrestled through with Catholic devotion and sacrifice, the tearing of flesh; someone will have fallen off the edge by the end.

The diary of Fanny Burney

I started reading Fanny Burney's diary — a 1940 Everyman edition I haven't looked at in decades. Perhaps after my week in France, a major diary moment, the idea of a late eighteenth century diary was appealing, and after a number of late-night short bursts of reading without great involvement, one day this week I spent much of a day feeling not so well and lay on the sofa in the new room with a hot water bottle and read more than a hundred pages. Weakness gave me patience with old-fashioned language, and a new-found susceptibility. 

Fanny Burney had no formal education at all, but grew up in a cultured household and educated herself by reading from the family library. Thus are free spirits made. For a number of years she was Keeper of the Robes at the court of George the Third, and became close to Queen Charlotte. Illumination here from  The Madness of King George. Fanny Burney slips in beside Helen Mirren's portrayal of Queen Charlotte. The crossover is in itself touching. Ill-health forces her to quit. She is sad to leave.

By now I am thoroughly engaged with this diarist, and can visualise her in the diary silences as well as in its reported days. She addresses frequently her two sisters, especially Susy, as if she's writing for them. Her diary permeates her family. The two sisters, who were considered more favoured than Fanny, did receive two years of education in France, but there's no resentment, and only affection for her father, as well as an extra father known as Daddy Crisp.

The finale came last night, awake as usual, and near the end of the diary: Fanny Burney, F. Burney married a Frenchman and became Madame d'Arblay. They spend some years in France, amid festering franco-britannic relations. No free movement here. A passport was more literal then: issued for one journey. Six weeks to negotiate crossing the Channel was nothing. 1815, and Bonaparte was ready for the fall. Madame d'Arblay left Paris at the dead of night and arrived in Belgium in time for Waterloo.

That day, and June 18th, I passed in hearing the cannon! Good heaven! what indescribable horror to be so near the field of slaughter! such I call it, for the preparation to the ear by the tremendous sound was soon followed by its fullest effect, in the view of the wounded, the bleeding martyrs to the formidable contention that was soon to terminate the history of the war. And hardly more afflicting was this disabled return from the battle, than the sight of the continually pouring forth ready-armed and vigorous victims that marched past my windows to meet similar destruction.

Reading Anne Carson in Paris and at Méricourt: Plainwave

I thought before I came to Paris that I would not haunt my old haunts, I would start again, but here I am, haunting, in an average café, with an omelette and a glass of wine, savouring the word Sully on his Hôtel across the street, and reading Anne Carson, a little, watching cyclists turn en masse onto the rue St Antoine.

Anne Carson on The Life of Towns: 'I am a scholar of towns, she says, let God command that. To explain what I do is simple enough.' 

The simpler you get the harder it is. Anne Carson leaps about & leaves spaces into which you fit— your omelette—your understanding—her writing hurtles, short talks, diary, things to say. 

A large part of the book is a diary written along the camino de compostela. My visit to Paris and Méricourt sur Seine was a diary week. I woke up, made tea, read Anne Carson, wrote my diary and looked at the Seine outside, the barges loaded with sand, gravel, and the bargees' cars. 

Have you seen Jean Vigo's film L'Atalante?

Anne Carson is in love with knowledge, she says. Each day of her diary is prefaced with a quote from one of the ancients, eastern or western. The depths and lacunae of ancient texts bring on her lurching style, words pulled from unexpected places, glistening.

Humpty Dumpty At Home

 Philip K Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, my choice this week. Going into abeyance. I always liked that word. I have been reading my America diaries, 1977 and 1980-1 and writing Monday Night At Home, after the radio programme, circa 1963, which I loved, where I first heard Ivor Cutler. Philip K Dick is never at home. No Direction Home. Not Monday nor any other night. The muddying of capitalism in Oakland, late nineteen-fifties. Humpty is a car mechanic, Dumpty is a car salesman. 

Why this was the choice a few days before going to Paris, I have no idea. Abeyance, perhaps. The chance to read afresh, in all innocence.

SPENT LIGHT : A GOOD RUIN

Architect Louis Kahn said a building is only good if its ruins will be good, I read in Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Louis Kahn believed that we humans are all made of spent light— ruins of another kind. I read Lara Pawson and as I read I am not sure this is where I want to be, on this bed of anger, indignation, among the barbed domestic objects of Lara Pawson's life, which is your life, my life, the objects that populate our domesticity, make up our errant psyche. 

The thing is, I like a bit of labour. I feel complete when I get down on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor. I take real pleasure retrieving the large sponge from the cupboard beneath the sink.

I polished the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor today. I know what she means. She and I can meet on our hands and knees.

Which is to say, viscerally. In a building, empty or full.  Ideal for nighttime reading; you read in good faith, you don't know if a line or two will gel and carry you or simply you'll get tired enough to sink into your own world, which is sleep.

Sunday Lunch in Ballinhassig, cooked by Joe, who had built his house from dreamtrade, the company he built on the red tape of international trade, he'd done the Ballymaloe cookery course, bought the Cambridge Beckett Letters and started Proust. It's a great beginning, I said, 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' Actually I said that more to his daughter Lia, who is fifteen. She has no idea how going to bed early is a good beginning for anything, but she might remember later. 

Death Row, Texas, Global Indignation

In three consecutive baths I read an article by Lawrence Wright  in the New Yorker about a group of women on death row in Texas. I hadn't thought to read it but then I did. How does the New Yorker celebrate its centenary but with this enormous iniquity: women who seem to have done terrible things but if you consider their lives, their early years of abuse and neglect, if these women have killed someone it is equal to their having been killed, slowly, from the beginning, so any crime, so-called, any evil, any darkness clinging to them is hardly their own, and that's what they must die for.

J. M. Coetzee, Booker books

Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1999, and only now, in 2025, I read it, and find myself impatient with the plottedness, careful and incisive as it is, historical and compassionate, forcefully engaged with maleness and its needs, mindful of history, careful —and distracted — with family.  

In the last week or two I have read Coetzee's three autobiographical books: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and dipped into his correspondence with Paul Auster.  How he dealt with himself there is somehow more palatable than the fiction structure built in Disgrace around David Lurie, Communications Lecturer, twice divorced, etc, to allow him to think around himself. I couldn't take the opera that Professor Lurie was writing about Byron's latter years. Does he really need to concoct an opera around his baser instincts.

That's why I don't read Booker Prize novels. I feel forced into a bottomless query. I'd rather be out routing compost heaps. 

The Moon and the Bonfires — Cesare Pavese

You have to read books twice in February. The mist is down. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese you'd have to read twice at any time of year. I read the first chapter twice, to begin with. Twenty years on a man returns to the Piedmont hills and farms where he grew up, legitimate now he's rich, redeemed, staying in the Hotel Angelo, walking the old lands with his old friend Nuto. This is a climate more than a story. He might be staying in the hotel, he might buy a farm, for now he buys a penknife for a crippled boy. That could be me, he thought. Even with the leg. Not so much reading, more temperature-taking, making an even way of words through a troubled past.

Only on the second reading do I sense the geography of it, the different farms, the people who lived there, which vineyard had which grape, who lay with whom, and died of it. There is no future here, despite repeated attempts. 

I have been watching the BBC adaptation of Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of the first BBC series I ever watched (the other was The Golden Bowl). I was entranced by this time spent in a life I couldn't have known, but did. Long vistas of lowlands, a  presbyterian stoicism, fed on porridge in a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon, a wooden plough tilling the low land, a marriage an evening party and then there's the outdoor work to do next morning.

Once you've read that Cesare Pavese was not the creature that he wrote, he was not an illegitimate bastard but he felt like one, his nickname was not Eel, but he felt like an eel, he slithered around with none of the eel's savoir faire. He contemplated  his old friend Nuto, who had not left, had not made his fortune but carried on.

He might have wound up as many do in this valley, growing like a plant, getting old like a woman or a goat, without knowing anything of life the other side of the Bormida, without ever stepping out of the routine oaf home and grape-picking and village fairs. But though he never travelled, something did happen for Nuto, a destiny of sorts — I mean this idea he has that you have to understand things, that the world is all wrong and it's in everyone's interest to change things.

BOYHOOD: inside the Coetzee chill

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.

Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives? 

It takes a while. 

I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation. 

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy. 

Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder.  ....

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

 It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.

MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

She stood among the circles and colours of Richard Gorman paintings, her flared patched jeans down to the floor, a brick-orange beanie, light hazel eyes, among light flicks at her phone her sweatshirt read Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Yes, I thought, I didn't have it written across my chest above my flared trousers when I was twenty, but it was my home ground.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turns out to be a song by Smashing Pumpkins. Infinite sadness, according to wiki-google-etc, is a form of anxiety that can be remedied with the right drugs. They are missing the art of sadness, the occupation of melancholy. Private, inarticulate, infinite sadness remains intact. That's the beauty of it. 

The Library at Castlemartyr Resort

The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fifties green and pale sateen, the flowers are white carnation with baby breath, one flask per table.

I had saved The Pole for our stay at Castlemartyr. J.M. Coetzee, in portrait as in pages, is forbidding, and so is the narrative; we ease into it, unwillingly at first. We accompany Mr Coetzee's gradual acceptance of the story he tells, his easing into it by numbering short paragraphs, then longer pages, till the numbers are no different from chapter headings, and the chill gives way, at the last, to tenderness. 

The Pole is a Polish pianist with an unpronounceable name, a Chopin specialist. The woman is Beatriz. Likened, and not, to Dante's Beatrice.

Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come.

The books in the library at Castlemartyr are faded Dickens, book club Daphne du Maurier, a little Shakespeare (and I saw a mentor's Macbeth by a table in the hall) (our room has a softened hardback Irish  Civil War on the table under the tv). There are coffee table books about baking and preserving, a florid volume of Dangerous things for Boys. The only other person there that afternoon was a young man, recently a boy, at his laptop who never looked up. I wonder who had the task of fitting out The Library with books.

FOE DEFOE & COETZEE: one black beetle knows another

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera. 

There's a new mighty volume on Defoe. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. He would love that. He who was the eighteenth century in English letters, has engendered a handbook. I read a review in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fact Man'. 

Defoe could talk to Everybody in Their Own way. He had fingers in many pies, he'd been there, done, or knew someone who had, he was a one-man band, a self-publicist. JM Coetzee plugs into Daniel Foe, into Cruso, and Friday; into his reading. His writing literally emerges from his reading, as from Adam's rib. Gathering his own hinterland into the weave: South Africa, America, Australia. 

J.M. Coetzee looks the same in all his portraits, as if he were already a portrait, a portrait of a portrait, a stab at a portrait, three-quarter view, three-quarter darkness. Giving away less and less with every iteration.

After a swift read of the slender Foe, I started the only other Coetzee book I have, Elizabeth Costello; which I found painful. No, I kept thinking, no you don't have to do it this way. In fact, drop it all, do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

I did pass GO. I read the whole book, with a deepening revulsion/understanding. There are many ways of inhabiting books; one black beetle knows another; yes. Elizabeth Costello is a black beetle; as is J.M. Coetzee; as I am. But once we're there, in the black beetle arena of books and reading, we're as different as we can be. Difference is what makes us black beetles in the first place. We need to differentiate as we go along. Constructing and undermining with every move, every word.

the beautiful boy always dies

In the novels of James Purdy, the beautiful boy always dies. In The Nephew, his second novel, Cliff is missing in action in Korea, and then dead; in Malcolm, his first novel, the eponymous, very young man who waits on a bench, can only die after being claimed by a succession of eccentrics; in In a Shallow Grave, Daventry, with hair the colour of corn silk, and possibly otherworldly powers, is plastered to a pine tree in a hurricane.

Malcolm is his most famous novel, and the one I liked least. James Purdy has his device: a fifteen year old who lives in a hotel and waits on a bench for his father, perhaps, and meets a succession of people who all find him irresistible but have troubles of their own and sometimes he doesn't come first in their needs. He marries one of them (her third husband), and then dies, and for this reader it is more of a convenience than a climax. 

The Nephew is a small town novel. I have a soft spot for tales of small town life: somewhat suppressed and wistful older folk who are forced to learn secrets they'd rather not know, constantly adjusting to the shifts in the tone of neighbourhood life brought by each new revelation. 

In a Shallow Grave, a war veteran needs looking after, the beautiful boy is Potter Daventry, of mysterious, possibly violent past, he sees beyond the raw mulberry skin of Garnet Montrose until one is permanently attached to the other. Daventry dies and Garnet's skin returns to a more normal colour, beyond death, as if by transfer of atoms.

I read these three novels nine years ago. All at once. Some elusive writers you have to take hold of a few books at once. James Purdy is elusive. His books are full of applicants and supplicants, a shifting crowd of emigrants who always lose their centre; that's what always happens. The beautiful boy, hair the colour of cornsilk, will die instead of you. 

LOWLIFE TANGO: Damon Runyon and Nelson Algren

What am I doing with the pit of the year? Guys and Dolls set up several wet/windy/cold afternoons; a present from Gertie to my parents in 1958, a Broadway romp like Dickens on rollerskates; I missed it already when I finished it, but thought about talky books in general, and lives a long way from mine, in particular, like a writer whose name I couldn't remember at first, but, having decided to go along the bookshelf starting with A, I soon found: Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side.

To read Nelson Algren you have to drop your pitch and raise your game. Instead of Broadway, you have box car, flophouse, areaways, a low tight focus, painful syncopation of day to day progress, or not. Instead of Spanish John and Nicely Nicely Jones, you have Kitty Twist and Dove Linkhorn and Big Stingaree, Out Front and Natural Bug. They mill around Perdido Street in New Orleans, the summer of 1931, country boys and daddy-o's, waifs and strays and halfies, old Europe and self-made panders, looking for the next quarter, tenspot, C-note, querying everything.

'Give me animals, at least they know what they're doing. Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

Do you know about elephants, how they come on?' she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

If you'd stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you're saying,' the wool-tie sport suggested.

Well', the girl explained, 'I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk 'n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn't be no elephants.

'So what?'

'Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they're doing.'

Dove Linkhorn is our guide, barefoot, letterless — he has only reached B by the time he reaches New Orleans. He has a moment with Kitty Twist, 17 year-old runaway, in a playground.

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

'Just let me know when you've had enough, Red. I got all day.'

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn't had nearly enough.

'Catch me when I come down!' he warned her from the top of a chute.

And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck.

After more than two hundred pages Dove Linkhorn is studying M and N, with the help of Hallie Breedlove, ex- of Legless Schmidt. Nelson Algren goes the distance; his language is what we read. Sounds obvious, but but never more so than here. By the time Dove Linkhorn, or Red, or Tex, is reading, and listening, we have learned his language, and can read as he does.

Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody's pappy got entirely drownded. Full fathom five Thy father lies.

So when, fully literate, he is smashed by halfy Legless Schmidt, we are aghast.

'I like to get up close to accidents' Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove's broken mouth, that was trying to speak through swallowing blood.

Blind, Dove Lindhorn goes back to his village in Texas. 

This afternoon all my roof windows are closed by snow. 

 

I, Gombrowicz

 'A masterpiece of philosophical fiction' says one of the puffs on the back of Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz. Philosophical fiction may be the same as a concept novel: scenes bear ideas but not narratives, they veer about, clumsy as adolescence reimagined.

And now suddenly there appeared before me the possibility of a warm idyll in a spring I thought irretrievably ended, and disgust gave way to the marvellous appetite of these two young people. I wanted nothing more, I had had enough of this agony. I, a Polish writer, I, Gombrowicz, chased after this will-o'-the-wisp as a fish chases after its bait—

This is on page 31. From then on I was a detached reader. Happy to read lying down in front of the stove and detach some more. Doze. Read some more.

The open shutters disclosed a radiant morning with clouds racing over the bluish garden soaked in dew, and the low sun cast slanting rays which seemed to implicate everything in their slant—the house slanted, the trees slanted! Amusing! Most amusing and witty! The horizontal surfaces were vertical and the vertical surfaces slanting!

There is displaced male lust and fantasy, less subtle than Eric Rohmer's films, but I, Gombrowicz, I, Witold, writes out of 1940s Poland, nicely rendered for our era by wikipedia: The Germans wipe out Polish intellectuals in the territories incorporated into the Third Reich, as well as in the General Government, resettle hundreds of thousands of Poles, limit the rights of the Polish population, and lock Jews in ghettoes.

Maybe the wikipedia terseness is more appropriate than it knows. All novelistic communication in such an atmosphere has to seem false, at a constant remove, aggressively so even, and perhaps, once Gombrowicz had escaped Europe and gone to South America, the style remained with him: Pornographia is no less of a potboiler than The Possessed, which I read last week.

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.