Affinities, Brian Dillon

If I had gone the way of writing thinking books instead of poetic/creative books, I'd write like Brian Dillon in Affinities — and most of his other books — informed by the same impulses, not critical but digressive, sympathetic, reaching for those images and words that have impinged on him and fed him, many of which, especially the words, have also fed me: William H. Gass, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum. 

I start to compile my own book of affinities. Jean-Pierre Richard on Baudelaire's taste, for example. Virginia Woolf. Certain humans, bereft somewhere, bring certain sensations, phenomena, to bear on their creative lives, and are at least momentarily replete. There would be more music, more landscape, in my list.

On holiday in Portugal, as I read Brian Dillon, on this or that bed or beach, P. read The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abrams, which I glanced at, read a sentence or two, and felt that people like him, like David Abrams, academics and professional intellectuals, create a professional distance.  

Brian Dillon inhabits what he is writing about. There is no problem. Images and words compose him: affinities are what he's made of, instances of himself-in-others that he can recognise.  

There are ten short essays on affinity, in among pieces on writers, photographers, and the more personal affinities, not all of them understood with gratitude. Eccentric aunts. Family in general. Wayne Koestenbaum's 'ruinous attachment to the opening theme of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15.'

This affinity, says Koestenbaum, is a kind of crush, and like a crush it tends to mark one out for the moment as faintly mad. The one who feels an affinity embraces knowingly, eagerly, his or her own madness and stupidity, idiocy. Affinity exiles us from consensus, from community.

Like Brian Dillon, I write for as long as the mood is on me, stop when it shifts or vanishes. No sense of a structure or a goal, or even that I've said all there is to say. Impossible, she says. Like the streets of Olhão, wriggling behind the waterfront, now crumbling, now wedding-cake, there is only an end when you give up looking for one.

'I'll side with what I can't understand'

Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

 I finished Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays, on the last day of our holiday in Portugal, and was left wondering how she gave us a sense of intimacy with these people, and the war, and the land, without ever seeming to dwell long enough for us to know them, the people, the war, and the land. Yet there is an insistence, as people appear and disappear, marry unsuitably or oddly or not at all, grow old or die or think about how dying would be all right if it happened. We don't need to be told what people's feelings are because the onwardness of events takes the place of individuals and the feelings they might have. Or feelings are not the point. Onwardness, history, the interleaving of people, not even families particularly, any mesh of friends, neighbours, acquaintances. There's a coolness, distance, a looking outward at the broad flow of events, marriage, a baby here or there. Writing is a way of keeping going, not involving, urged by detail, little teeth like a wolf, a mother who works in a cake shop, or arrives from foreign parts with chocolates, goes away to school.

The quietly main character, Anna, becomes pregnant at 16, and marries an older man, a friend of her father's, who tells her a number of times, as most descriptive things like the little teeth of a wolf or a crooked smile or hair like chicken feathers, are said a number of times, that she is an insect and he just a big leaf on which she rests. He hoped she would become a strong woman but she was still an insect who didn't know how to do anything except perch on a big leaf. He is killed at the end of the book, at the end of the war, by the Germans. So, her big leaf gone, with one of her brothers and one of the family from across the road, she considers the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and the long difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.

The chapter when Anna is dealing with, or ignoring, the fact that she is pregnant, about halfway through the book, is one of the few internal moments.

She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution.

The internal shifts quickly to the external. From the baby inside her to the revolution she might start. This is how we determine what is important. Abruptly. At times you'd least expect.

Our holiday went into a third week because we missed the plane home. There was a strike at the airport. The next day I started reading Natalia Ginzburg again, at first just sentences or paragraphs here and there, then outright I was reading the whole of the second half again, unwilling to leave these people behind, finding the emphases with pleasure, the insect face, the crooked smile and the little wolf teeth, threading the book like pearls.

READING AS WAITING

Two books, by Natalia Ginzburg and Brian Dillon, sit untouched on the windowsill downstairs. I bought them for our trip to Portugal and have kept them unopened. Meanwhile, a Raymond Chandler story, Goldfish, a few (unsatisfying) stories by Graham Swift. Most compelling might be the Rough Guide to Portugal, well out of date by now, but full of the charms of the partially unknown: town squares we'll sit in and vistas we'll absorb from hilltops and balconies. 

Graham Swift's Learning to Swim & Other Stories must have been the follow-up to Waterland, which I liked back then for its wet fenland intrigue. These days, his language seems flat and over-expansive. The undertow is on view. There's a completion I don't want and often don't wait for.

'Goldfish' I read by the stove upstairs, published for the 60th anniversary of Penguin, 60p for 60 pages, written by Chandler whose work is so filmed that his words leap off the page and into the stance of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, words for actions, and then the laconic pause that marks the end of one story and the start of another.

Natalia Ginzburg, whom I have been reading on and off for the last number of years, has no completion. You get in, stay a while and get off at what might be the stop at which you began your trip, yet you have travelled a long way to get here.

Brian Dillon's new book Affinities I imagine reading in the Hotel de Moura, a blue and white convent at the foot of the Great Lake; then later in front of the Forte de Sao Joao da Barra in southeastern Portugal, lying on a sandbank, facing south.