native denizens

Who are the fellows who cut the hay, nowadays. George Ewart Evans, writing about a Suffolk village more than a hundred years ago, knew who cut the hay, what their tools were called. 

James at the gravel pit up the road showed us boulders, and chatted a little. Eighty per cent of the ornamental gravel they sold was imported, he said. The local boulders we chose would be prized in Galway. The gravel of my childhood on the east coast of England, was exotic in Cork. Very yellow, very clean and fresh. That's how you know this is a rich country, I said, when people prize stones from another town, another country, more than their own. I hadn't thought about that, said James. Varieties of gravel around the cornus contraversa variegata in the visitor carpark confused the shrub so it became invisible. This is very mediated landscape. Earth and stones unearthed, displayed. Meanwhile out in the boulder zone goat willow showed through, some bird's foot trefoil. The mud was caked and cracked like Africa. 

Why were we choosing boulders, you might ask. Who cuts the hay around here. The zero grazing machine, that's who. That's why we were choosing boulders.

George Bourne in his 1912 book Change in the Village, said:

.... how attached he must have grown — I mean how closely linked — to his own countryside. He did not merely 'reside' in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone.

People cannot talk about themselves in their place any more. The ground is too unstable. You can't stop progress.

In the School chapter of Ask the Fellows Who cut the Hay I lingered on this, coming full circle on where I lost track of arithmetic:

How many furlongs, rods, yards, feet and inches and Barleycorns will reach round the earth, supposing it according to the beset calculation to be 25,020 miles? The boy, in a page of working, threw a girdle of 4,755 million of 4,755 million Barleycorns round the earth.

running in the family

The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family was in my hand. A childhood in Ceylon, family as riotous as was manageable in prose, albeit poetic prose. In the poetry is the managing. Snakes run through the house. The cobra that settled on the radio was not shot because the radio was the only source of music in the house. The snakes ate the hens' eggs, so hundreds of ping pong balls were introduced in the nesting boxes, which disabled the snakes for a while. Mervyn Ondaatje, Michael's father, ended up keeping hens. As did the mother of Marguerite Duras. Last dance of a falling family. 

Michael Ondaatje found everywhere stories and people in Ceylon when he went back after twenty some years, he found roads and food, trains and verandahs. In and around Maldon, Essex, where I grew up, I found the places I went to get away from stories and people: salt marshes, old allotments, disused railways. Between the chickens and the cacti and succulent society, I came to like Mervyn Ondaatje.

He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain water plants arrived from islands in the Pacific.

Inside Jacob's Room

Afternoon up at the pond with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room after a conversation with D by the bonfire the other day about Fahrenheit 451 & which book we'd choose to learn, to be. After a long pause D said Wuthering Heights, though she didn't want to be Wuthering Heights, either. I said I could imagine being something by Virginia Woolf, many years after the dream in which I talked to her about writing & she said it would be all right. I already am something by Virginia Woolf.

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a blind mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart — her sinful, tanned heart — for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.

Virginia Woolf is the model observer, passionate & dispassionate, questioning & confirming, full of doubt and assumption. Making firm and letting go. Jacob is a carrier more than a character. No one interacts except in these paragraphs. Jacob's room is Virginia's room also. And mine.

 

strange things

'But really Mattis', she said with a toss of her head, 'you think up so many strange things these days that I hardly recognise you.'

This testimony made him light up with joy. Hege knew how to make you happy when she wanted to. He went and sat down by himself to be alone with his joy.

I have been rereading The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas these nights, for the clean otherness of Norway. Mattis lives with his sister Hege by a lake. She knits jumpers to earn a living. He thinks up a job as ferryman, he has only one passenger ever, but he goes ferrying every day. He has a job to go to. He takes sandwiches. His simplicity sets him apart. He ferries no one in his leaky boat that couldn't take a passenger anyway. 

The canadian woman at the radical book fair on Saturday nearly knew strangeness by heart.

Reality could be avoided.

It's possible.

No one who looks at me

believes I am dancing.

She said it across our table of books. Like Mattis having his strange things acknowledged. She looked along the display of Coloured Books, and sometimes at me, disbelieving. She'd been in Cork for three months, au pairing. This was the end of her stay. The privacy of that internal dancing was suddenly there between us.

Erasmus in Inniscarra

I noticed this fragment on the front terrace for a day or two before bringing it indoors. Placed on a square of paper it became a drop-down map, somewhere between Italy and Ceylon.

There's an anecdote about Erasmus noticing a scrap of paper on a muddy street and pausing to read it. The printed word was rare in the 15th/16th century; rare also those who could read. Which is still true in the twenty-first century.

It looks like a partly rotted seed packet from Seed Savers. As a child I read labels on jars, info on cereal packets, all kinds of small print, and a constant flow of books. As an adult also. As well as t-shirts and tattoos, cardboard boxes in several languages.

My Erasmus scrap of paper could have continued, out on the terrace, to deteriorate, to transmute, with its inks, into the front garden and beyond. 

WASTE OF LANGUAGE

In Arthur's book emporium P spotted It walks by night and was immediately drawn. Arthur gave it to him, for the title, one of the dark green Penguin crime series. One damp afternoon I read it, if reading includes whizzing and forgetting and getting impatient, annoyed at this waste of language. 

How schematic the duke, the tennis pro, the lunatic, the gombeen man, the shady woman, the fresh uncomplicating Americans, decoys all, in the sealed room puzzle. How did someone get in and out of the card room, slice the duke's head off with a heavy sword kept sharp for just such an occasion. 

I don't see life in terms of puzzles. I'm annoyed that I've been drawn in to this universe where everything is for a purpose. Which is why the god-fearing good citizen can read detective novels with a clear conscience.

It walks by night. It, not He, not She, not They, walks by night. And in Paris. A gambling den. A chinese purveyor of hashish and opium. A chief of police. It is a woman, the duke's wife, with eyes of ambergris, who kills the duke who is not really the duke but her first husband, out of prison and in disguise. 

In a detective novel written by a man, J. Dickson Carr, in 1930, it, is likely to be a woman. A man is a man in all his guises, a woman is denatured if she acts. Is that it? 

SAPPHO PAGES

Sappho pages are mostly empty, which means you can read them in any order. 

but I to you of a white goat

and I will pour wine over 

That's one page.

and gold chickpeas were growing on the banks 

That's another.

Some pages have columns of square end brackets. You read the few words that are still legible somewhere, extant, the square brackets lead off into the missing piece of papyrus. Others are quotes in ancient authors, surrounded by bracketless space and a deeper, less populated silence. 

Sappho was a poet/singer on the island of Lesbos circa 630 B.C. Anne Carson's translation and arrangement of all that's there and all that's missing, is my current warm-up reading.   

I have been reading and rereading and reading out loud to an audience, my own pages and much that is missing from them, working their sequence and letting it go out there and come back as afterwords, afterimage.

Sappho is all there is of her, and, as I pluck the pages, of me.

gathering flowers in so very delicate a girl 

Natalia Ginzburg & Beryl Bainbridge, Lynne Tillman

Two of the early essays in Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg are about London in the early 1960s, the melancholy, desolation, lack of imagination, and the depressing food. She admires the get-up of old ladies in evening wear, and otherwise can find nothing to like. 

Beryl Bainbridge in The Bottle Factory Outing speaks for this England. Employees at an Italian bottle factory in London go on an outing: big blonde Freda, mousier Brenda, fumbling Rossi, aloof Vittorio, Patrick who'd fix a leaking toilet. Seediness turns nasty. 

I keep putting the book down. Natalia and Beryl. Even their names fight each other. I read Little Virtues twice on our ten day trip to Portugal, struggled to finish The Bottle Factory Outing. Promise of worse in a seedy world is not the best for spring travel.

The last three essays in  Little Virtues are wonderful. I read them in a strange agony of appreciation, so easily can recognition turn to pain. The best was reading on the beach at Cacela Velha, the second or third time. P was practicing tightrope walking on the sand without a rope but with a balancing pole. The empty beach with very fine sand and a calligraphy of grasses crisscrossed by black beetles making long work of our lunch crumbs, draws in every empty beach I've known, Natalia Ginzburg draws in my thoughts about human relationships and silence. And the sun shines. I've chosen the house over the water where I would stay or live, the oldest of them, nearly buried in pines.

FALLOW

FALLOW   

formal visceral viral philosophical comical botanical  

A READER'S GUIDE

There's a point where reading is no different from writing; there is more reading than writing when you are writing.  I have been reading/writing on the subject of fallow for the last few months. The writing is even sparser than usual, as befits a fallow field. The reading is broadcast across the floor of my room, with concentration around the stove. Salinger, Anne Carson, New Yorker, NYRB. Cabin notes, on my desk, to be reprinted. When I was twelve I was instructed, in the interests of better sight without glasses, to rest my head in my hands and think about nothing. This was the beginning of my acquaintance with nothing. This is why I am adept at walking, reading, writing fallow fields for weeks on end, around dusk.

For Esmé With Love And Squalor

When I was about thirteen this title on my parents' bookshelves, with a lurid Pan cover — completely off the mark — For Esmé with Love and Squalor by J.D.Salinger, caught my eye. I read it the way you read when you need to be reading, for and against the future. At thirteen, Esmé's own age, you use what you have learned so far, in anticipation of more. Esmé is precociously articulate, aware of what fabric this is, this language she can't help performing on a wet afternoon in a café after choir practice. And yet, for all that, there's an honesty, a straightforwardness. She is waiting for her hair to dry to show that it is actually wavy hair. She is looking after her younger brother Charles who chokes over the punchline of his only riddle. What did one wall say to the other? Meetcha at the corner. She wants this American soldier/story writer to write a story for her. Not just for her, she amends, but for her. 

idle reading

Much of current reading is infill: I read before I write; I read when I can't sleep; I read in the bath. The rest of the time I am weeding, managing the days, cleaning and replacing. There's an important small pile to the left of my stove: two books by Lena T who stayed with us last year, Anne Carson's Plainwater, an article in the New York Review of Books about classical music, and how it could be the answer.

Some critics have held out hope that classical music, whose decline mirrors the decline of the utopian imagination, might play some part its recovery as well.

The other piece in this pile is another article from the New York Review of Books, by Merve Emre, 'The Illusion of the First Person'. I re-read it every week or so. Tonight I am not ready to read it again. Some pieces you only need to know they're there. Like Thomas Browne, whose capital letters for Elements and Legalities continue to affect my writing though I haven't read him for many years. Or JD Salinger, whom I am re-reading, the italics of his speech, helpless emphases of family life, endemic conversation we need to rehearse.

JD Salinger and Anne Carson, at dusk

I like to have a bath early evening, to divide the day from the night. I read, for preference, the New Yorker. Today Jill Lepore remembered a house she lived in as a student in Boston with fluid others and shouty neighbours, several cats. Then, up in my room, in front of the stove I look again at Franny and Zooey. In the middle of the night last night I read the letter Zooey reads from his older brother Buddy, near the start of the Zooey section of the book. Zooey is reading in the bath, the letter resting on his dry knees. A well-thumbed letter, four years old. Some family is worth hanging onto. JD Salinger is a voice from my library, wearing his cleverness, like Zooey, like a wooden leg.

Anne Carson is adept at deploying her wooden leg. I have had Plainwater out for some weeks now, and this evening was the start of 'Canicula di Anna', which she rapidly inhabits so that several pages in she speaks for Anna, a creature of renaissance Italy as much as for herself; she is not concerned what we think. Any more than any of us in last night's dream as we clambered about our business. P swam the length of a cold pond. There were clouds of paper in the bedroom. And one of P's former students.

Corgi Height: twelve inches above the ground

An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he says, quartering the lane, chasing rabbits. Hedgerows, cornfields, hop-gardens and apple orchards on either side. He is recalled from his meditations by a yelp of pain and fear from a field away. The Corgi needed help. Kentish hedges were high and dense.

Finally I took off my coat, and pushed it before me through the hedge. ... Bramble and eglantine parted before me, and the cruel spines of the hawthorn. The coat saved my face, but from one or two back-lashings of briar sprays I caught some feline scratches on hands and wrists. And an ankle suffered too.

He finds his dog four or five feet through a thicket, beside a stream, caught in rusty wire in front of the rabbit burrow, whimpering. The only way to get to his dog was to lie down on his belly and make his way, slug-like, muddy and wet through the open space between the ground and the bottom growth of the thicket.

There we lay together, a muddy pair. Now I had to get him out. ... it was not so easy ... I looked about me, to realise that for once I was looking at the world from below, from Corgi height ... the smallest weed, the speck of dust, magnified, or conversely the whole world dwarfed to the compass of this patch of woodland and meadow-fall ... I was looking at the universe from below.

I read several of the pieces in Small Moments, by Richard Church, to see why I'd bought the book whenever I did — some drift towards small, towards moments, the ivory paper with wood-engravings, all this would have seduced me, if to be seduced is to understand only this much — then the story of the Corgi chasing rabbits and the civil servant/poet pushing through a hedge and a thicket, confirmed that this was an other person's rendering of what I know, what William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and so many ruralists and poets, know also. Then it's just a question of how you like your eggs. 

THE WHATSAPP DIARY

I read an article by Sam Knight in the New Yorker about whatsapp. I read it in several goes, unable to pursue it start to finish. Each time I started at a different point and registered a different thought about our detachment from our lives, the saturation of that detachment, the loss of solitude. We are — you are, I don't have a phone — all writing diaries on our phones, wallpapering our current lives with phatic white noise, ready for the moment of total amnesia. Which has already arrived. 

25 million times a second after the World Cup in Dubai, whatsapp buzzed. A new fabric of the earth. 

I write a diary. With a pen on paper. A fountain pen, with ink, paper of a certain size and texture. For many years I wrote every day, and cheated if I missed a day. Now I write every day or two or three. And it's gnomic or banal. The gnomic I need to write. No one is reading it. I'm talking to myself. The banal is, yes, banal, and crucial to sanity. Descriptions of stasis and departure are crucial. Frogspawn and pussy willow. The back of the cat looking out at a hooded crow. Wake up.

WhatsApp is phatic before anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app's servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing.

A Polish ethnographer, Bronisław Malinowski, a 1922 book coined the phrase 'phatic communion' for those idle phrases we exchange in recognition of our common humanity and which dissolve on impact, or used to. Except now, on WhatsApp, they don't, they stay there forever in data centres where night and day they consume electricity and water to cool our communal fever. 

 

Russian influence

The last story in Elephant, a selection of Raymond Carver stories, is an imagining of Tchekov's death, over a glass of champagne, which led me back to Aldo Buzzi Tchekov in Sondrio, followed by JM Coetzee's imagining of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg. Reading in January has a russian influence. Follow it. 

Chekhov died at forty-four. Since the age of twenty-eight, he had suffered from insomnia, and he treated it by drinking a bottle of beer every night, often of bad quality. He thought that he was descended from the artisan Andrei Chokhov, who cast the colossal cannon (the czar of cannons, which never succeeded in firing) that is in the garden of the Kremlin, near the czar of bells, an enormous bell, broken during casting, which never succeeded in ringing—symbols, in Chekhov's words, of that "Russian tendency to spend money in the construction of every kind of uselessness when the most pressing human needs are not yet satisfied". 

RAYMOND CARVER

Deep in my re-reads of Patrick White, Thomas Wolfe and John Cowper Powys, I remembered Raymond Carver, the brevity of his writing, aided and abetted by Gordon Lish, his editor; I needed to read something radically edited, writing that stayed close to the bone, as Jane Fonda liked to say of her body.

What do we talk about when we talk about love. We talk about cigarettes and alcohol and our individual histories. We talk in the domestic context. We empty the ashtray. Someone is about to leave or has left. Various splintered families, always in the name of something almost nobody has, something that isn't there when the story ends. And the story ends. Patience gives out. Narrative stasis has been achieved. The next story will echo this one. 

Wolf Solent — an excruciating read

With the best will in the world — from my first reading I remembered only a rural girl who could whistle like a blackbird — I re-read Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys and found it excruciating — overwrought — I liked the searching, exhaustive and ecstatic in 1966 — all names and intrigue and yearning for the absolute — Squire Urquhart compiling a sordid history of Dorset, Wolf Solent assisting, ghosting, eagerly enacting a modern counterpart — sordid if you like, or confused — with rural girls and other men and women— without let or scruple — essence of girl and the other, kindred spirit.

I read rapidly through the six hundred plus pages, wanting to rest with some character or other, only at the very end realising that the character I wanted to rest with was me, the reader who lapped this up once. 

SELF-ABSORPTION

Eugene Gant, Thomas Wolfe's narrator in Look Homeward, Angel enters the theatre of human events in 1900, a new start at the foot of a page of dead heroes. The first noun in the novel is destiny. Five hundred lusty, overripe pages of family life with Eugene at the centre, ensue. 

We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old. p. 33

Thomas Wolfe, Eugene, wrote himself large. In the womb he was already a man. For the next thirty-eight years he wrestles with it. He protests. He observes. He describes.

The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; p. 177

You could edit these five hundred pages down to five and there your Eugene Gant would be, stripped to yet unknown essentials.

He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad. p. 267

You could turn Thomas Wolfe into Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver into Thomas Wolfe.

Walled up in the great city of his visions, his tongue has learned to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. .... He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged to the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. p. 319

 By page 482 Eugene Gant is nineteen. The Angel is in the rearview mirror. 

But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of his blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning. p. 482

Oh but there was.

 

ACTS OF THE BODY

In the nineteen seventies a number of long novels written about twenty years before were reissued, including the works of Patrick White in Australia, John Cowper Powys in Wales, and Thomas Wolfe in America, all of them works that slowly emerge from what feels like the long, nearly cosmic or mythic breath of a place. None of them, since then, has shown through in my walks along the bookshelves as a potential reread, until this long indoor period with very little coming into my reading life through the post or any other way, which led to my going back to Patrick White. As with other rereading lately, unleavened by work outdoors, I am easily irritated, less by the telling than by the reader I was in the nineteen seventies, and possibly the writer I was then, too. Though an ancient doggedness prevails and, after The Aunt's Story I read The Tree of Man, grateful for anything that goes on this long, with a slow sense of ageing and inevitability, great evidence of people's bodies, as if to set them forever as thin, yellowing, travelling, possibly mad aunt, or thickening, solidifying worthy farmer of few words, and his worthy wife, doubtful children, their places in what had been a wilderness and gradually became a town, with post office and motor cars. 

What then was wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. This is my life, he would have said if he had expressed himself other than by acts of the body.

The other day D said she didn't like novels because she didn't like feeling the presence of the author. She thought it always sounded pompous. It wasn't the moment for discussion but I would like to some time. Is it pompous to create characters who cannot express themselves, for whom the sudden discovery of a dragonfly on a mulberry leaf has to stand in place of all that they might say, if they could, about their lives together? The Tree of Man is nearly five hundred pages long. And most of the characters decide, where possible, to say nothing.

 

BOOKSHELVES

I dreamed I went to stay for a few days in a hotel and installed in my room the bricks and planks that for many years I used as bookshelves, complete with an array of books to feed my habit and defend me against all-comers. This, perhaps, because for the last few weeks of revolving 'flu I have read a considerable number of books, mostly early Penguins, by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville West, the latter the earliest and least worthy, Penguin number 16. When I left the hotel I took the books but forgot the bricks and planks and then had to make elaborate arrangements to retrieve them. As when I first came to Ireland I brought my bricks and planks with me, thinking it would be easier to have bookshelves ready to install, and as it turned out, southern Ireland was not rich in clay and so rather short of bricks, especially bricks of character, so my foresight was justified.

I often turn to early and mid-twentieth century novels, all of them variously cracking and reinforcing upper class codes of behaviour, especially when I'm ill. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh knew each other well; they were of a kind, he far more caustic than she, and broader, more able for savagery, and, eventually, depth. After Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, all short, derisive books, and still in bed with a violent headache, in need of larger narrative in order to find these past months of my own life, I read Brideshead Revisited, and, once past the Oxford posing and spending and drinking, and beyond, or inside, the tv adaptation I loved in the eighties, or was it nineties, found myself fully involved, to my surprise, in the ghastly turmoil of Catholicism.

Evelyn Waugh is strangely serious when he is. I read Brideshead during the worst of my third 'flu, the whole book in not much more than twenty-four hours, and felt almost as convinced of the grave hold of Catholicism on people's lives as the narrator, Charles Ryder, aka Jeremy Irons. Uncomprehending but acknowledging. Ireland has not made me think about Catholicism in the same way. It's too much part of the fabric, along with the music and the language and myriad daily habits; whereas Evelyn Waugh's involvement with English Catholicism represented a dive out of the meaningless into the mystery and the sadness.

Reading in tune with 'flu

 During 'flu part one I did not read at all, I coughed. My head ached. All the bodily weaknesses I've ever known came through and made themselves heard. 'Flu part two, still coughing, I read voraciously, that same body needing the balance of a reading head. Books that have gathered in recent weeks are re-read, newly porous. Pavese's The Beautiful Summer I read for its title, for any pitch-perfect version, however poignant, of a beautiful summer.  

I asked Annette what her comfort reading was, and she said the Mapp and Lucia books and Nancy Mitford. I read The Pursuit of Love in a day, Love in a Cold Climate the next day. There is little to equal this kind of reading. Especially a long way north of a beautiful summer. Nancy Mitford's pitch is reassuring. She allows you to be where you have never been, in a large house full of children who meet in a warm upstairs cupboard where they establish the boundaries then ignore them, for the rest of their lives.

Why is this so comfortable? In Mitfordland the template is there. The warm upstairs cupboard, the grumpy Fa, the aunts, their husbands, the dogs the horses the rich acquaintance, the useful heir. One of those small groups that, when you need it, can be an entire borrowed world, and just the thing to tide you over. 

For a corrective, apply Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Penguin number 75. From Mitfordland to Metroland. I read the schooldays first part much too fast. Evelyn Waugh was obnoxious then. After Nancy Mitford this was too much. Later, as I coughed less, I read more slowly. The irritant was in me so I could afford to ignore it. The odyssey of Paul Pennyfeather through public school and Oxford is just the thing to pull you out of 'flu. His fall is more compelling than his decline. He is manipulated by everyone, but works through it in that circular, stupid way we all enact sooner or later, back to our beginnings via the grotesqueries we have been pushed through, a spell in prison the very thing. 

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 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.