SKIMMING

What's wrong with skimming, with being superficial? says Rosalie in Yiyun Li's story, 'Wednesday's Child'?, as she waits for a train in Amsterdam. She has other radical ideas about reading. Couldn't we excise books, like unwanted DNA, she asks. Wanting another opinion, she gave Agota Kristof's Trilogy to her fifteen year-old daughter, Marcie, who soon afterwards walked under a train.

She wished there had been more time for Marcie to skim on the surface of her life. What's wrong with being superficial? With depth always comes pain.

That's why we go on holiday, where the greatest depth you can have is to sit on a rock by the Meeting of the Waters, on a still, quiet day, drinking liquorice tea looking down through the water at coins thrown in for luck or protection, and across the water to the elegant little bridge and the weir we came through with the canoe circa 1992, holding onto a rope to slow our passage through the rushing water. 

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness, absolute stillness is death; and when you're dead you no longer wait for anything.

The day before I read 'Wednesday's Child', I spent an hour or so skimming Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, a slightly fictionalised account of the years spent in mental institutions. Skimming was all I felt like doing that day. I didn't want to go any deeper or take any longer than that. Which is perhaps why Yiyun Li's story made its impact.

JANET FRAME'S CREATURES

The fourth misty day. Reading Janet Frame's stories. How she made short melodies of her childhood stories. Songs in the morning and poems in the afternoon. Naive teaching suits the introspective in the class. Words made music of your awkwardness. Her early stories are tiny sketches of girls with different names but the same, frame, sorry. The story called Dossy stopped me in my insomniac tracks. A story of an imaginary friend, a way-station friend, with whom you can giggle.

The nuns heard someone laughing and they stopped at the gate to see who it was. They say a little girl playing ball by herself on the footpath. It's little Dossy Park, they said. With no mother and living in that poky little house in Hart Street and playing by herself all the time, goodness knows what she'll turn out to be.

 She turned out to be a writer, which she was all along.

Edmund White and Janet Frame: TANGO

When you are confined to quarters in January, even snowed in, nothing better than A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty, by Edmund White, a climate in their own right. 

Like a blind man's hands exploring a face, the memory lingers over an identifying or beloved feature but dismisses the rest as just a curse, a bump, an expanse. Only this feature—these lashes tickling the palm like a firefly or this breath pulsing hot on a knuckle or this vibrating Adam's apple—only this feature seems lovable, sexy. But in writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts. One even composes one's improvisations into a quiet new face never glimpsed before, the likeness of an invention. ....  I say all this by way of hoping that the lies I've made up to get from one poor truth to another may mean something—may even mean something particular to you, my eccentric, patient, scrupulous reader.

I interviewed Edmund White in the 1990s in my office, top floor, number 3 Brighton Villas, on the Western Road. His way of sitting, half-slung and warm, permeates my reading now. A Boy's Own Story has the language of the gods. There's something he needs to create through words that is never quite there when you need it. So you must write.

Because a novel — these words — is a shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at tall requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added.

Last night we watched Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, from Janet Frame's autobiography. Janet Frame had to write, to keep watch, to touch base, nearly all the time. The world out there, family, friends, society, was not to be trusted. She felt ungainly, unlikely, unlikeable. She had big red hair. An awkward gait. After the death of her father, going through his things, she put on his boots and relived his stance, in low light. Curly, he was called. 

A tango with Edmund White and Janet Frame is the flavour of the week. The strangest tango is the strongest. Edmund White could not keep away from the world. Janet Frame had difficulty being in it.

When I was sixteen, I took out from the library Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame's first novel. In the list at the back of my diary of the books I'd read that year, it came after John Bratby's Breakdown and before Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. That year I read 128 books, though some were followed by NF, for not finished. Owls Do Cry was labelled F, for fair, which meant I didn't get it. John Bratby got A, for awful, and Carlo Levi G for good.

Edmund White said his plots were scrapbooks. Janet Frame might say hers are plucked reconfigurations of the family tapestry. Different names. Different selections. In Owls Do Cry her name is Daphne, her brother is Toby, who takes fits, her sisters Francie and Chicks, their parents Amy and Bob. 

I don't wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an' find things.

The lost lives of tyres and hoovers and books. They'd found Grimm's Fairy Tales the last time. Francie dies in a fire at the dump. Chicks, now Teresa, twenty years later has a house built on the dump. While Daphne spends years in a distant dump of her own, a seacliff of lunatics dressed in red flannel sacks and electro petrified every week or two. 'It's up to you to co-operate and pull yourself together.'

Edmund White, Bunny, Dumpling, so comfortable/pained with where he is, always disarmingly in flood, weaving his own tapestry. And then, back on high ground, the freedom of his (perceived) perversity. If it wasn't perverse he might not feel so free. Edmund Valentine White 111.

READING NOTES HOME AND ABROAD

In northeast London, after reading too much crap, P goes back to Henry James and Joseph Conrad, back to the books he read at college where you had to pay attention to know what was going on. In Brighton, M is reading The Trial and The Waves, in respite from academe and other speaks. In a gallery in Cork, A is reading The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Sightings by Budd Hopkins, under plain cover. In a café in Macroom, a woman is reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is somehow invigorating, especially in January. 

PSYCHOTHERAPY, the diary

Setting up psychotherapy is the hard part, said Rudy Wurlitzer in New York, Easter 1984. He gave me a copy of Alice Miller The Drama of the Gifted Child which I read on the plane home, thinking that if any of it applied to me I'd have a hard time accepting it.

A conversation last week with C sent me back to my diary of 1984/5. She wanted to know was there a moment in psychotherapy when it all came clear, when you thought, that's it, now I see. It's not quite like that. There aren't revelations, or at least you don't know they're revelations until some time afterwards, when you're starting to learn to live with their truth.

After maybe four or five sessions in which I responded to the questions of M the therapist with what seemed even to me to be neat cameos of my life, she said:

What can I ask you that will make you react? I started to go numb, it began in my chest and into my throat. What conditions do you lay down for my having access to you? Tell me three conditions. I stared out of the window at the cement between the ridge tiles on the garage roof. 'That you be interested', I said weakly, 'that you feel for me'. I couldn't think of more, I couldn't think. I was crying. Leave the tears, said M, don't wipe them away.

It was the start of a very long, slow wash, all the atoms of the fabric of me battered and opened. 

Opening up, what do you think of in that phrase? A void, a huge gaping space, a wound, raw open flesh, I replied.

A year of thinking dangerously. Doing M's homework each week. Making bread. Making mud. Seeking shelter. Asking for things. Thinking about punishment. Writing unsent letters to my parents. You could get it from a book, said M, I'm helping you manage the emotions, so that everyday life can continue, teaching, etc. 

Several months later came another moment.

What do you see when you think of yourself as a small child?

A small lump beneath high-tension cables with an electric pole on either side.

The first image that comes to mind is the most accurate. That small lump between electric poles was one I came to know in the way of rare astounding knowledge that shapes a life. I was an image maker by inclination. Sometimes I could see nothing else. I saw my family in a waste land, on waste ground between houses, among those weeds I've always been drawn to. In dreams I was often on see-through bridges, terrified of the fast black river rushing below.

I wrote four volumes of diary a year back then. As a cast of characters and emotions reels through my life and my diary, my neat, monkish handwriting bursts into capitals and different coloured felt tips, with scribbles that evolve, by mid-late 1985, into drawings. For much of of the duration of therapy I'd lost the ability to listen to music. Now my diary was losing its language. I was scribbling in paint.

The words and the music came back. My solitary life became a life in partnership. Many years later I met M by chance in town and told her she'd turned my life around, and she glowed. 

PLAGIARISM: the further reaches

I read Kathy Acker and think of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which I loved in 1978. Reading a few pages brings back all the unsayable,  all the oversaid of that era. Pain can be cloying. These days I am brought to a halt on page 26 by an embedded line of Rilke. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And read no more. In reading Elizabeth Smart I am reading Rilke, Rimbaud, and the Old Testament, to name a few.

Kathy Acker was born a few months after I was. The last section of Tarantula is 'The Story of My Life', September 1973.

1947. I'm born April 18th; my family thinks of itself as aristocratic, though it isn't, since my grandmother (mother's mother) came from Alsace-Lorraine to U.S.A. poor and in her later life married a wealthy man. They properly worship money as do all good Americans. They assure me that only the unworthy work. I will never have to work since I'm rich and will marry rich, that if I ever have to think about money it's because I've come down in the world. They're incredibly stingy with me. These conflicting early trainings make me proud and shy, confident that I'm by nature above other people and aware that everyone, especially my parents, hates me. .... As a baby I spit at whoever I feel like ....

As a writer she spits. She is thrown in prison for trying to figure out her desires. Or is that the Marquis de Sade? She has read Alexander Trocchi, Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love (and, my first cookbook, Around the World in Eighty Dishes) WB Yeats, Dickens.

This is writing through your reading. Kathy Acker has a lot more starting torque than Elizabeth Smart. A lot more hatred.

My mother wanted to make me exactly like her. I look like her; we both have large eyes, same bone structure, thick child's skin, dark brown hair, purple lips. We're fond of our bodies and wilful. From the first day I was born and hypocritically smiling, pretending I was happy, I opposed her: I set myself against her so that I should become someone else. She began outwardly to hate me when I began to menstruate. She wanted me to be nothing, like her.

Her autobiography segues into that of the Marquis de Sade. As, in earlier chapters, she copies events from other writers and in copying becomes their characters. Language creates her, not necessarily her own language. It is compelling to write down the words of others. If by reading you become the characters you're reading about, by copying other writers' words you embody them, inhabit them, and so release yourself from yourself. Which was maybe what she, like many writers, especially poets, was trying to do all along.