Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

'I am nourishing a creature' wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, who nourished in her turn another, nameless, unnamed, unnameable creature, male, larger than life, like Byron silhouetted against mountain peaks, but vulnerable.

What do any do but digest as best they can? Mary Shelley had a mother, a father, a husband and a poet silhouetted against mountain peaks to digest through her own pregnancy and birth into Frankenstein and his monster.

The looming man, vessel of my early adolescent dreams. I dreamed him behind me and I couldn't move, in the lane out the back beside the Baptist Church.

For two hundred years the vessel of the monster fills, empties, refills with our terrors, our mothers, our fathers, our gullies, our peaks, our disguises. Jill Lepore in The New Yorker made me re-read Frankenstein then wonder if I'd ever read it at all, if you could be whacked the same way twice. It could have been one of those books you absorb without reading, like Moby Dick or Proust.

But the politics of "Frankenstein" are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

 What does the baby sound like? Is he crying? Yes.

The reader makes free with Frankenstein and his monster, digests as s/he will, confounding Frankenstein and his monster, fear with adventure, love with loss, innocence with corruption. In common with our collage/assemblage habit two hundred years on, Mary Shelley pulls in all she knows from her innermost doll to her father's and her husband's and his friends' science, gothic and romance. This is who she is at the time she is writing, which is also the time when she is producing creatures herself, who die, and cry. 'Awake and find no baby', she wrote in her diary.

For the first theatrical production of "Frankenstein," staged in London in 1823, (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as "–––––".

Lazlo Krasznahorkai, War and War

War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai has settled its sentences around the last week or so. I have read a sentence before sleep and then slept into it. A sentence, chez Krasznahorkai, is also a chapter, often of several pages. One reviewer said he (probably) had never got to know a character as well as the narrator of this novel. People cannot take very much interiority. Said the bird. It is true you read and you get further into Korin who has left middle europe and gone to new york in order to type into a computer and all eternity the manuscript he found or wrote before —

I am not sure how clever I want to be, how desperate I am.

Willa Cather, My Antonia

A chance visit to St Gobnait's shrine revealed why I have felt uneasy reading Willa Cather's My Ántonia. We happened on St Gobnait in Ballyvourney, County Cork, on the eve of her day, February 11th. Graves were being tidied, lurid primulas planted (with their pots) at the foot of her statue, some early prayerful women were already doing the stations of the cross. We gave the place its due, talked to a gravedigger, refreshed our ignorance of the rosary, then drove off on an unknown road south, rather than east, the way we were going, as if in order to confirm our stranger status.

Willa Cather's immersion in the prairies of Nebraska would have thrilled me when I was twelve. I may have read My Ántonia around then, when I depended upon immersion in whatever long grass would shelter me. But it was just long grass, not the long grass of home, or the long grass of my country, adopted or otherwise, it was temporary shelter; there was nobody else around, and wherever I found myself later I would seek out its equivalent.

Although My Ántonia focuses on newcomers to Nebraska, these were Bohemians, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes who would stay there, and build and prosper, many of them. They confirmed the stranger in the narrator, who, like Willa Cather, moved there from Virginia when he was young. The land and the seasons give the book its pace and its roots. It isn't coy, or matter-of-fact. The very levelness of it confirms its truthfulness and my unease.

St Gobnait was the patron saint of bees. She chose her spot in Ballyvourney because she saw six white deer there, and the water was good among the small wooded hills. These days the deer are only carved into the metal railings, and water is everywhere around the old holy well because of attempts to drain the expanded carpark. A new well has been installed, more convenient, less boggy, though less charming than the old one, with its rag tree and bed of coins under the water, and there are instructions on how to proceed with the stations—certain parts of the route have to be walked twice, a bit like the Grand National.

I cannot stay with St Gobnait and the mysteries—joyful, sorrowful, glorious and luminous—I can only look; as I cannot settle among these new Nebraskans in the early twentieth century, I can only read.

Beckett, How it is

Beckett's How it is reads quiet after a performance of Part I by the Gare St Lazare the other night. I hurry along, looking for their performance on the page. There are some glorious moments of mental exercise. Despair too strong a word. Of course. As well as humour. Too comfortable. But, in tribute to the Gare St Lazare and their staging, lighting, their sudden shifts, their discomfiture, or was it ours? I was back in the Everyman Theatre, or wanted to be.

When I read How it is the last time, in my sprawling teaching Beckett period, I marked little, remembered less. 'I always liked arithmetic it has paid me back in full' leaped out of the dark, near or far, of the Everyman; the clouds parted with clarity and a smile. This is one of my Beckett quotes, one of the tenets of my faith.

Somewhere, perhaps more than once in the performance, two voices chased or echoed the same words, up on stage where we the audience sat, at the back, as wrong and as privileged as we can be (at the back of the stage looking out on the flats and the stalls), Beethoven, I thought, opus 31, maybe number 2.

There's a moment where we suddenly understand the piano to to be innately double, like ourselves, with our sack of memory, our native bent. That was, sometimes, what the Gare St Lazare players did with Beckett. Voices came from all levels of darkness and distance, within inches, within aeons, of each other. I fell among the interstices. It was warm and peaceful even as the voices carried on in the mist and a group of dark hooded creatures crossed the middle distance.