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.

THE END OF AUGUST

In a viewing room in Culver City, Los Angeles, May 1981, on a very comfortable private sofa, I watched a freshly-minted movie, The End of August: flawless sky, long sand, soft horizon, parasol framing the face, the sea, the end of August pristine for all time. From the novel by Kate Chopin, which I haven't read. The film has also vanished from sight. The beach remains.

My Sebald summer had interludes of Norman Maclean and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as well as The New Yorker and Hortus. P was surprised I liked Norman Maclean. Sometimes an action tale, language as muscular as logging, as delicate as fly-fishing, so hard-won, is what the reading body needs.

I'm nearing the end of Austerlitz up at the pond. Watching bumblebees work the scabious. The end of August in Inniscarra. Wind from the southeast, a yapping dog and a truck permanently reversing. I'm learning the art of letting things slide off a duck's back, and sleeping better.

Austerlitz is as compelling as your own past, or anyone's, half-restored, half-escaped. I can't read too much at a time, then I have to turn away and watch a spider repair the damage I did to its web when I sat down. 

Since I was twenty I have tried to confirm with patient handiwork, as Sebald says in the introduction to A Place in the Country, my peculiar position, his peculiar position, theirs, ours, wanting to write all the time, keeping a diary, following a route, taking photographs, most of which deepen rather than clarify. 'There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.'

Perhaps it would be better simply to set down .... a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.

CONTES CRUELS

On my former teaching shelves, I found a battered french book with no back and a detached front cover, frayed & browning pages, soft as an animal. The plays of Corneille. I'll never read that again. I threw it in the stove basket and, a day or two later, thought I'd put it in the fire, looked at the opening pages, it wasn't Corneille at all, it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, friend of Mallarmé, his NOUVEAUX CONTES CRUELS et PROPOS D'AU DELA, and a few fragments inédits. Soft chalky pages are seductive. French publishing a hundred years ago followed the aesthete, the effete, as now the pronoun sensitive. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam — I don't know what his friends called him — was a creature of his own decline. La vieille France, la France profonde, has a network, a spider's web, of decaying aristocracy, and he was one such, working his way out of reality as much as he could. Vivre, les serviteurs le feront pour nous.  

Sara said the other night that she liked to pack an adventure bag when she was young, which would have included a pair of binoculars and a book with soft pages she took from her grandmother's shelves. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam would garnish an adventure bag, no trouble. You could stop and read it under an apple tree somewhere.

THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE

Major turnout of my room throws up all kinds of jiggery-jaggery. THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE has been hiding among paper samples for the past few decades. Written by my sister, Ruth Mazet, whose life was more or less dedicated to horses. Her woe to the end of her life was that despite her best efforts, horses weren't enough. 

She makes abundant use of capital letters and letters in bold, the font is large and paper shiny. She always refers to the horse as he/him. I can hear her voice, and our mother's, their insistence when they were sure, which was often, plus the defiance to know otherwise. With barely a flick of the reins I can read it as the good Ruth guide. How much of her life, from foalhood to maturity, channelled through animals, is here, as if in reverse, in another language, another life.

With all the will in the world, things can, and often do, go wrong. If not understood and handled correctly, problem behaviour will usually go from bad to worse, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Here then, is a short summary of the most common problems, why they happen and what to do about them.

Oh! Oh! Oh! 

I have never googled my sister before. She wrote another book: My Horse Rears: Curing Problem Behaviour in Horses With Kindness and Consideration. And she had a website, horse-talk. Not much reading leaves me speechless, but this did.

DESERT & RIVER, men in their landscape

William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf has on the front cover a photograph of a pair of pugilists on shiny wet ground. A tale of a friendship that ends in a desert. Lymie Peters and Spud Latham, the athlete and the devout, thoughtful observer, each faithful in their own way, they complement each other until one day the egg has broken and they don't. Sally Forbes brings this about. 

The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense out of their lives.

Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It has on the front cover Brad Pitt on a rock casting a cursive loop over a tree-lit river. I have liked the phrase of his title for many years. I didn't know how he came by it, and didn't wonder enough to read the book, until now. I bought a copy from a bookshop in Jena, which arrived yesterday, and I read the title story yesterday and today, up at the pond and in the middle of the night. It's a thickly printed pocket book from 1992. The fly fisherman does not know the river, he becomes the river, and he becomes the river by knowing how the river was made, and knowing that it was made with fishermen in mind. 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Time Will Darken It

William Maxwell turns out to be the writer of the moment (reading desires are so precise sometimes); his carefulness, sense of justice, the way his chapters are born out of and interleave with each other, the distance in time, all this enfolds me, especially lying on the sofa in the new(ish) room with new eye(s), the cat on my feet, asleep, I do not want for anything except the summer I have agreed, for the afternoon, to forget.

Time Will Darken It was published in 1948, set in 1912, in a family house with a fractured couple just before a party, hairline cracks perhaps. Southern cousins come to stay, and a house, a marriage, a child, and myriad other substrates, are stirred to breaking point. The title is a quote from a 17th century painting manual. These sharp colours, sharp emotions, fulsome yet restrained dramas that skirt tragedy, they will darken. As certain books darken, deepen. Others, like one we were given recently and another that was left in the cabin, Francis Bacon's Nanny and Yellowface, will not. Francis Bacon darkens, but not an account of him by a reimagined nanny a hundred years later. I doubt the yellowface rant will darken either, it will simply deliquesce, like a slug under salt.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW

I was looking along the living room shelves, newly brightened, for some clear short tale for late july, and chose So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which I read up at the pond, between dunking in the dark water and maybe pulling out some water soldiers and bogbean and wondering why on earth, precisely, Florrie Heelan has to move his fields around so often with heavy machinery on quiet days in summer. William Maxwell is farmland/small town America, his Illinois rural and foreboding, accepting and at the same time evading. Acceptance a kind of evasion in its own right. 

My copy has pencil marks beside passages I liked the last time or the time before that. I find my former selves, old influences that have permeated, by now, and become part of my fabric. The child who says, So Long, See You Tomorrow, to his friend, is there on my current meadow, along with the lost furniture of his childhood, sofas, mahogany tables, pictures, big square books full of photographs that he knew by heart, that his fingers had absently traced.

If they hadn't disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, so Ortega Y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.

 

READING IN A BROODY SUMMER

Most evenings I read On Foot the Velvet Odyssey in its blurred carbon copy from 1978, trying to find the ancestor of my language and internal rhythms today. And then I read the first few pages as revised onto my computer this broody summer while listening to Beethoven or Schubert in the early evening, drizzly or the only gasp of sun that day. Then I read the update of Monday Night at Home, which I wrote twenty-five years ago, and now feel the need to say again in today's patois. I don't know why all this revisiting.

This afternoon, on the sofa in the new(ish) room, I read the New Yorker summer fiction issue and dozed into its tales. Here we all are, lurching into print, or out of blurred carbon copy. On foot the velvet odyssey reads as even older than it is, an England of summer fêtes and radio shops, all set into the frame of my adolescent withdrawal. Monday Night at Home reads as more like now, or fairly recently, when my language had caught up with me and I had caught up with the world.

Sebald & Bone the Dancer

This is a Sebald summer, I'll reread everything. After The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants. One of Sebald's emigrants is Paul Bereyter, an ideal teacher, if you could have one, who brought his children on his own quest, outdoors as often as possible.The great thing about rereading books is how the complexities build, your own and the writer's, and some of them turn into music.   

... Paul told me that as a child he had once his summer holidays in Lindau, and had watched from the shore every day as the train trundled across from the mainland to the island and from the island to the mainland. The white clouds of stem in the blue air, the passengers waving from the windows, the reflection in the water — this spectacle, repeated at intervals, so absorbed him that he never once appeared on time at the dinner table all that holiday, a lapse that his aunt responded to with a shake of the head that a grew more resigned every time, and his uncle with the comment that he would end up on the railways.

Paul Bereyter ended up purposefully lying on the railway tracks, a good choice of death for a claustrophobic. Sebald is so good at partly redeemed sadness. 

Circa 1978 I wrote On Foot the Velvet Odyssey, the strange non-tale of Bone the dancer, his town, his being, and how he drew them, their voices, their footfall, all of them and their dead, into Wyse's Meadow for a grand finale. I looked at it again in 2022, and transcribed the first few pages onto the computer from a blurred carbon copy sent to a friend who kindly returned it, without comment, I think. What happened to the top copy I don't know. Then, in 2024,  Jack the dancer from Australia came here looking for earth; he brought some spare of his own, in case, and found he was already in a novel since before he was born, before his nickname was Bones or he knew about loss, or earth. He stayed in our cabin for two weeks and realised he'd been here all along. What happens in your novel, he asked. I've come ten thousand miles to find myself in a novel, I need to know. I have been looking, Jack, to see what happens. It may take some time.

SCHERRY SHI

There's an election in your country today, said M. with a certain sharpness.

It isn't my country, I said, and you can't decide for me. 

You're British and you always will be, she went on.

No, I never felt British. My country is the place where I've dug and planted. Where I've nested. 

Scherry Shi was born in China, lives in London, her parents are in New Zealand; she is thinking about these things in a more immediate way than I am. You could see it in the way she moved between the tables at the book fair where we met her.  She made a small book called departure, of softened photographs and some text. Departure /from air /from soil /from water

...  I could not stop thinking of my homes, which I depart from, which I return to, of those within me, of those away from me; of those above the earth, of those on the ground.

Home is where I was, where I am and where I may be in the future.

Reading Sebald in bed, talking to M in the morning, working in the veg plot in the afternoon, looking at Scherry Shi's book in the evening.

Herzog is the voice of Sebald

I was reading Sebald up at the pond  — I'm halfway into The Rings of Saturn, his journey down the east coast of england — and the voice of Werner Herzog came through. We watched his film about the practice, the business, in Japan of actors standing in for missing relatives, a father, for example. So Werner and Max (Sebald was Max to his friends) meet up at the pond on the warmest afternoon this year. In the half-light of East Anglia, where I grew up, Max is plugging for home, but along the way he excursions with Conrad to the Congo, second-longest river in the world, and to China with a miniature railway engine fetched up in Lowestoft, Suffolk, and lastly the propeller plane from Amsterdam back to Norwich. Werner lives in Los Angeles. He is all over the world, as far away as mind and body can go, he is up on deck, a slight smile on his face, interrogative, explanatory, quiet. In both voices, Werner's and Max's, there is the soft german sense of offering, of willingness, Max's more learned, yet quizzical, as he makes his way down the east coast of England, Werner's — and this is film, not the page — more benign compère. The modern german voice does not want to impose, but is so pleased to reveal. I was reading Max and I could hear Werner. The hawker dragonfly is here again. And the electric blue darter. Small frogs are assimilating into the pondside and beyond.

A COMMON PARADISE

The Garden Against Time, IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE by Olivia Laing, who is restoring a garden in Suffolk, reading Thomas More, Thomas Browne, John Clare, W.G. Sebald, William Morris, Derek Jarman, and making an argument for the commons, for the commonality of land, the primacy of land in our lives. 

I read the first half very fast, then a pause, then the last two sections up at the pond today, with intermittent sun and very small frogs, much smaller than their late tadpole state, it seemed, hopping in and out of the pond. 

Olivia Laing's book made me think about what we're doing here, our moves towards commonality. People come here and walk about and help. 'It's almost offensively stunning', said Jack the dancer from Australia, who's staying in the cabin, after his first walkabout last week at the champagne hour, early evening. 'It's like a dream', said Jyeung from South Korea. Inspiring. Paradise. Several people  have said.  Paradise is offensively stunning. Why? 

Olivia Laing answers that question to some degree.

RUNNING WITH THE RAMSAYS

I read To the lighthouse for epiphanies, up at the pond last week, for recognition and comfort, and then, unwilling to let it go, start reading the book again at night. Around and beneath the epiphanies, Mrs Ramsay wrestles with the question of rich and poor, Lily Briscoe, out in the garden with her easel and her painting—that reddish brown patch is Mrs Ramsay at the window knitting woollen stockings for the lighthouse keeper's boy— wrestles with Mr Ramsay's idea of reality which seems to be summed up by a plain deal table upside down in a tree. Mr Ramsay is a tyrant looking for sympathy. Mrs Ramsay can only rest when her youngest is asleep. Children remember everything, she says. An hour later, still awake, I try to remember the names of the eight Ramsay children, in pairs and singly, Jasper and Rose, Andrew and Prue, James and Cam. This borrowed family gathers other borrowed families as it goes along, other recessive guests, called Lily, William, Augustus, with their half-eaten internal dramas in the manner of Tchekov, Kurt Lippa for example, who grew up in Macau and played ferocious table tennis, loved Schubert and bel canto, an Austrian Jew who— 

Nocturnal reading is a parallel world, parallel and permeable. Reading Virginia Woolf up at the pond in June is not the same as reading her at night, a second time. Last week it was part of a bigger rhythm. The second time, every line is particular, my rest places are different: Mr and Mrs Ramsay, the eight children, the summer house on Skye. How Virginia Woolf refashioned her family into this book, ran with them again. This is what you have to do, what writing is for. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF, summer

Yesterday in the New Yorker I read Anthony Lane on Blinkist, the app for people who don't want to read the whole book. Most of the books on Blinkist are on how to survive/make billions. So many books on self-improvement, how to deal with this or that. Maybe Blinkist is giving these books what they deserve. They also reduce Jane Austen, Wittgenstein, John Milton. What do they deserve?

Today I read Virginia Woolf up at the pond.  To the Lighthouse. This was where I wanted to be. Reading sentences and paragraphs as they were written at a particular time by a particular person, V. Woolf in the afternoon, with her roll-ups and her writing board, finding her Moments. By late afternoon, not quite sunny but warm, more than halfway through the book, I can read the way a horse can break into a run, the way a cat can while away the time on warm liscannor stones, what I'm reading is an equivalence of where I am. To the lighthouse and the surface of the pond, the plants around it, the changing sky, the dreams I had last night and the night before, Mrs Ramsay coming to herself after the children have gone to bed, Lily Briscoe in and out of her painting, Mr Ramsay tying the laces on his beautiful boots — he had a way of tying laces so they never came undone — his wife's astonishing beauty, beautiful phrases, beautiful pictures, shadows in the fruit bowl, as long as no one wanted a pear, the astonishing beauty of the pond.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything.

I asterisked that passage many years ago. What is the difference between a Blink and a Moment? Do you play your days like a piano or trust the algorithm? The blackbird has a bath in the pond. A couple of planes go over. North wind. They come this way when there's a wind from the north. 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF READING

 

                LETTER L

                Selborne, April 21st, 1780

DEAR SIR,

                The old Sussex tortoise, that I have mentioned to you so often, is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in March last, when it was enough awakened to express its resentments by hissing; and, packing it in a box with earth, carried it eighty miles in post-chaises. The rattle and hurry so roused it that, when it turned out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden; however, in the evening, the weather being cold, it buried itself in the loose mould and continues still concealed.

I am nearing the end of The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White, my nocturnal book for the past few weeks. Apparently Gilbert White did not enjoy coach journeys, and took days afterwards to recover. Maybe the tortoise did too. The tortoise is more ancient than humanity. Sleep may be the key.

When one reflects on the state of this strange being, it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than half of its existence in joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.

Gilbert White was mainly interested in birds, but he also recounts other creatures, insects, the weather and labourers' wages, quotes latin and greek as among friends. Nature is his language; swallows, swifts and martins are his dialect, the letter his natural form. He was convinced that swallows did not go south in winter but withdrew some few hundred yards to a sheltered spot. A natural history always includes some wishful thinking.

UNE IMAGE PEUT-ETRE VRAIE

I like the french title une image peut-être vraie better than the english, Alex Cléo Roubaud, a portrait in fragments. The english brings out frenchness, not french, nor Alex Cléo Roubaud — her full name, her photos, her notebooks and letters — more the neutral catalogue quality that Hélène Giannechini brings to her appraisal of a short life in words and pictures, like a laying out, a door closing in great detail.

I'm well-placed to read her on a changeable afternoon in May, but I don't want to. An old unwillingness to recognise what I know best, creeps over me on the sofa in the new room, the cat asleep not far away, a few heavy showers, thunder yesterday, peppers planted out, borlotti beans started. 

A penultimate page entitled (BLACK) shows a photograph of six window panes and a cord-pull with a driveway, lawns, a belt of trees.

Let's pull the cord, hide the last photograph from view. I'll leave Alix's memory there. I wanted to write between the pieces of evidence. An account has emerged. Memories are words, and archives are documents.

       Fleshing Alix out in fiction was not my intention; I worked in the interstices between the traces of her that remain.

        This is not a photograph of Allix's life, but fragments of her work; scattered shards.

        A picture that may be true.

The Sylph Editions translation by Thea Petrou, ends with a letter to Hélène Giannechini. 

Making then, not taking. Through your wandering into the lexical fields of memory, action painting, dance, bullfighting, medicine and eroticism, I have followed Alix's processes in the darkroom and observed the imposition of her own physicality — a performance — on the film. And now I see the pictures, what they are made of.

    Thank you, Hélène.

SEASONAL

No month more than May pushes reading out of doors. Different books for different moments, different pockets of the garden. What to read where is the great question.

Alix Cleo Roubaud, a portrait in fragments by Hélène Giannecchini, translated by Thea Petrou, a young Canadian woman in France in the seventies and eighties, who took photographs, wrote letters and journals, had an affair with Jean Eustache, married Jacques Roubaud, died young, of a pulmonary embolism. Where do you read that?  

Not up at the pond on a sunny afternoon. Or up at the reservoir, with swims. Where Guy Davenport reigns, this year, or William Saroyan, for their intimate rhetoric, their matching of words to moments. Gilbert White for the small hours. Consideration of the swallow family and their variety, or why the cuckoo farms out her eggs. He hopes for a physiological explanation but there is none. He considers hedgehogs, witchcraft. He wants the swallow to hibernate in his village, though all the evidence is for winter migration. He loves the word, nidification. It is a pleasure to think of him in his house called The Wakes in the mid-late eighteenth century, observing his place, Selborne, in Hampshire, writing letters to like-minded scholars of the natural world, as I lie there, less interested in sleep than I was.

EXPLOSION IN A CATHEDRAL

Whoever I was who read Explosion in a Cathedral in the early nineteen seventies, I cannot imagine, it's hard to summon former selves, so I read fast now, looking for places to rest. 

Why did Alejo Carpentier choose to imagine the ripples of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, through a trio of young, stranded people. Orphans. What did he need from it?  In the early nineteen seventies, speaking for myself, maybe strangeness was enough. The strangeness of the world for orphans especially on Caribbean islands. Every new turn cuts through everything.

That's how I would have written in the early nineteen seventies.

In truth I can't read Alejo Carpentier now. 

Car Boot Sale, Blarney,. Bank Holiday Monday

Car Boot Sale Blarney, Bank Holiday Monday, the GAA pitch, I had walked the line the night before, from 2.30 onwards into the a.m. so was in no fit state, I could only look for books, or maybe plates and glasses. The complete works of Henry Williamson, for example. I should have bought Tarka the Otter, and The Beautiful Years, I loved them when I was twelve or thirteen. Henry Williamson's daughter cut my hair around then. There were beautiful years if you were this deep in the countryside. There was more than one copy of Akenfield. Plus Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne. Which house clearance did this come from, I wondered. Who were these readers?  These owners? I was in no fit state to ask.

I bought Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, a 1970s Penguin edited by Richard Mabey; as you turn the pages there's a strong smell of mothballs. And a Mason's blue Regency dinner plate. Pete bought a cement White Rabbit in a red and black waistcoat, for his next performance. A girl with false eyelashes held a ruched pale blue satin against her thin body. It's a bit long, she said. It rides up when you walk, said the vendor, the vendeuse.

Gilbert White had the living of Selborne, as they used to say. His house was called The Wakes.You were left alone to be awake, to observe, if you were a parson in an English village in the mid-eighteenth century, you wrote letters full of your observations and queries. The beautiful years, indeed. Giving names to birds and listening to their song, imagining their migration. 

I met Davina the window cleaner in Ballincollig this morning, outside the Quay Coop. She had been at the Car Boot Sale. I told her about the blue silk dress riding up and she liked that. Her brother and sister-in-law had pitches there. Home made cakes and bric-à-brac, old tools, you know. 

SOUTH AMERICA: CLARICE, ALEJO CARPENTIER

I have been in Brazil in the early evening, and the Colombian jungle at night, reading Clarice Lispector Too Much of Life and Alejo Carpentier The Lost Steps. Clarice is one of my familiars. Alejo Carpentier I have not read since the early 1970s, when I was reading and rereading A Hundred Years of Solitude and Borges' stories, 

I don't often sense a continent, even a half-continent through its literature. Europe I suppose I take for granted. People want to go to South America, I wanted to go to Macchu Picchu. I saw a picture and that the village I wanted to see, to be alone in a ruined, terraced village, looking out. Until I realised it was sold, there were queues, a problem with rubbish. I  read South America instead. Watched Fitzcarraldo. Read A Hundred Years of Solitude, again and again. Borges and Alejo Carpentier in my twenties and thirties

I liked the way they brought me on. I had a taste for what I didn't understand.

The narrator of The Lost Steps leaves City and Actor Wife, to go There, with mistress Mouche, the Colombian jungle, on a search for old musical instruments. Here. Mouche sickens in the jungle and Rosario comes forward, out of the earth. Your Woman. There. He goes further into the jungle, writing his bildungsroman, his threnody, on ever diminishing notebooks.He needs to go back to City for fresh supplies.

Clarice has enough paper. 

A work of art is an act of madness on the part of the creator. .... The madness of creators is different from the madness of the mentally ill. The latter, for reasons unknown to me, have chosen the wrong path. They are cases for doctors, while creators find fulfillment in their own act of madness.

 

Shirley Jackson & Guy Davenport up at the pond

Into the clear space left by reading Platonov, walks Shirley Jackson. We watched a film about her in which Shirley was played by a surly, slovenly Elizabeth Moss, and so I re-read We Have Always Lived in the Castle with her face in mind, her malicious demeanour. So childish you want to slap her. I wanted to get to the end of the book in order to get away from her. 

For our first pond day since — October? —  I read an article in the New Yorker about a singer whose sudden fame so knocked her sideways she went to Harvard to do a masters in divinity. 

For the second day, Guy Davenport, Ten Stories. All your curiosity focussed on the here and now. The socks going off, the icelandic jumper, too big, going on. 

In 'Belinda's World Tour', Kafka writes letters to Lizaveta from her doll Belinda, which she lost in the park, the first tragedy of her life.

Belinda did not have time to tell you herself. While you were not looking, she met a little boy her own age, perhaps a doll, perhaps a little boy, I couldn't quite tell, who invited her to go with him around the world. But he was leaving immediately. There was no time to dally. She had to make up her mind then and there. Such things happen. Dolls, you know, are born in department stores, and have a more advanced knowledge than those of us who are brought to houses by storks. We have such limited knowledge of things.

Belinda marries her abductor, Rudolf, yes, at Niagara Falls, and they are en route for the Argentine.

You must come visit our ranch. I will remember you forever. Mrs Rudolph Hapsburg und Porzelan (your Belinda). 

 

MEAGRE LIVES VAST LAND

Andrey Platonov's Chevengur is a large book about meagre lives in a vast land—southern Russia after the revolution. I read it in bed, during round two of a bad cold, at first put off by the size of it, in hardback too, but then grateful for the heft of the book, the chalky, well-designed pages that stay open if you put the book aside.  Most days, with rests between chapters, I found it beautiful. 

On the first page is a man alone who can fix or equip anything, who in summer lives out in the open with his tools in a sack. He treated people and fields with 'an indifferent tenderness, not infringing on their interests'. He is the first in a novel full of people adrift in some expectation of communism, which, according to one man 'might inadvertently have come about somewhere or other, since there was nothing people could do with themselves except join together out of fear of troubles and the strengthening of need.'

To call their lives meagre already seems wrong, as I lie in bed, under a duvet, with a cup of hot ginger to hand. Elemental? Desperate? No. Not any more than Beckett's characters are desperate. They are too far beyond. And, as with Beckett, therein lies the beauty. To say they live close to the land is an understatement. They are of the land and the land is of them. And the sky, the sun and the moon and the stars. They have nothing and expect nothing.

When property lies between people, they calmly expend their powers on concerns about that property, but when there is nothing between people, then they choose not to part from one another and to preserve one another from cold in their sleep.

Chevengur is a village in the steppes that has been cleared of its bourgeoisie and occupied by what one of the 'organisers' calls 'the proletariat and others'.

These others are simply others. Worse than proletariat—no one and nobody. .... They're fatherlessness. ... They were living nowhere. They wander.

They are wandering, one man suggests, if you want to put a word on it, to communism. And Chevengur has communism. This is stated as the vaguest and most definite of facts. These others had their first sense of the world in cold, in grass made moist by traces of their mother, and in aloneness. Not one of the others had ever seen their father. There are characters who read books, who fix things, mend roofs, collect plants for food, and so on, but the others sound like a barely perceptible human note. They are the disparate mass on the fringes of the masses, the proletariat, history's detritus. Here's one of them, thinking.

What first took place in him and his fellow others was not thought but a certain pressure of dark warmth. Then, one way or another, thought would speak its way out, cooling as it escaped.

I read Platonov for these depictions. For this slightness of life amid the vast spaces of the steppes. Since I was a child I have been bewitched by the phrase 'the steppes of Central Asia', the extent of them needing no support from the music of the same name by Borodin, nor the realisation from looking at a map, of their enormous extent, from Ukraine to China.

There is little difference between clear consciousness and the vision of dreams—what happens in dream is the same life, only its meaning laid bare.

TRANSIT

Anna Seghers' Transit has been in transit on the floor for several months, beside my chair. When I bought it I read a paragraph and sensed a depth I wasn't in the mood for. Then the other day, now that it's Spring, I picked it up, read the first few pages and found that, despite the moment in history — Europe evacuating ahead of Hitler's armies— there was a lightness of touch, almost a casualness. The narrator, who's young, German, but not Jewish, makes his way to Marseille, the only open port in France, seething with refugees looking for exit visas, transit visas, boat tickets, friendly folk in consulates, lost husbands and wives, manuscripts in suitcases, trying to get to Colombia, Mexico, Martinique, America, via Spain or Casablanca or Lisbon, anywhere out of this world. Transit is a seething surface; depth is optional or a distraction in late 1940 in Europe. People meet in cafés, eat pizza, marvel at pizza, pluck coffee beans out of barley to have one real cup a week, drink rosé on the nights they serve alcohol, talk through where they are and where they might go, under which name, hide behind newspapers when they don't want to talk, change their mind and their name, if it suits. Every ship might be the last ship, and if you do get on, to Brazil or Mexico, it might sink, and then all there'd be, if you're fortunate, is this permeable story, persistently in flux, which you have told. As the narrator says to the American consul, 'all those writers who were in the concentration camp with me, who escaped with me, it seems to me that we lived through these most terrible stretches in our lives just so we could write about them: the camps, the war, escape and flight.'

There's a strange levity about this. Anna Seghers herself left Germany in 1933, then was interned in France because she was a communist and a jew; she escaped from the camp and left Europe with her husband and two children, from Marseille, in 1940. She went to Mexico where she wrote this book, framing it as a kind of thriller with a young male narrator who uses, by accident really, the identity of a writer who has committed suicide.

The narrative thread is what you need to wend your way through the bureaucratic flux of transit. Any story will do, there are as many stories as there are refugees, stories of escape and documentation, boats that sink and boats that don't leave. Less dark than Kafka, less esoteric than Borges, and far less dated than we would like, now, in 2024, when travel is closer to travail than ever, and the world is filled with displaced people, 110 million at the last count.

WENDELL BERRY

I heard Pete's account of reading Wendell Berry's Stand by Me, a collection of his stories, while we were in Portugal. It was hard to get into, he said, old-fashioned, so many people you don't know if you should remember them all. It gets better, he said, as he went on, and eventually he was engrossed. 

Feeling ill and staying in bed for a day is a bit like being on holiday. The view is down to one window, it's quiet, there's nothing else you're capable of doing. Stand by Me is a substantial book, capable of seeing even a rapid reader like me through a day or two. I have liked Wendell Berry's essays, up to a point. He can be too earnest. But the stories in Stand by Me gather momentum. Perhaps there is no other way to persuade of the value of land, of community, than by weaving tales of the same group of people, involved in the same activities, interconnected, part of a membership, as one character, Burley Coulter, likes to say. The penultimate story, 'Fidelity', is about the death of Burley Coulter, and, debilitated as I was on Easter Monday, disinclined for much more than the smudge of a purple honesty flower outside the window, I was racing toward the end of the story. I had joined this small community of people gathered in the lawyer's office to bring about the defeat of a young detective who's trying to figure out how Burley Coulter was kidnapped from the hospital and taken to a reassuring death on land that he knew.

I read about this membership and their landedness and their mutual affection and support with awe. I have no experience of this. I never will. You can't buy this as real estate or gather it up in pots at a garden centre and plant it. Yet I know the attention to land. Mat Feltner in 'The Boundary', an old man going to check a fence down a stream he has known all his life, clambers in the company of the dead and, on the way back up, tired at the end of the day, all but joins them. I think I have practised this kind of attention since I was very young, claiming woods, fields and streams wherever I found them, adjacent to where I lived and even passingly, from a paused bus or train. I have that need to occupy land. Wendell Berry is the doyen of this kind of occupation. 

REREADING UTOPIA

Last year we invited people to write a few lines about utopia, their idea of a society in which they'd like to live. We talked to people in Cobh, County Cork, and emailed friends. We thanked everyone who gave it thought and wrote it down, as well as those whose silence made us wonder why it is so hard to think beyond the confines of the society we are in. 

Utopia? That isn't real 

Utopia? Cobh is a very historical place

Utopia? It never works out, I hear

Utopia is a cas limite. Hard to imagine beyond the reality that surrounds you and you imagine an ideal, though you may not like the word. Take a leap. You have the time, the freedom. 

You have a neck, use it, Tony O'H used to say. 

Tread softly for you tread on my dreams. Mr Yeats.

It's a privilege to bear witness to your ideals. Bernard Laughlin.

A plague mentality has overtaken us. A  state of ranting and whingeing. We only have time for opposition. Utopia isn't opposition, it's dreaming radically and convincingly beyond your current state. 

HOLIDAY READING

Read the first chapter of Lynne Tillman on the plane, Haunted Houses. Too speedy at thirty-seven thousand feet. A quick whizz through the early lives of three girls,  Short sentences. All emotion kept to the full stops. I already had enough haunting of my own. I was impatient with Jane, Grace and Emily. I wanted to sleep. The cloud cover over southern Portugal was frayed underneath, shreds of it dangling in yellowish light as we approached the airport. 

On the communal bookshelf in the guest house in Tavira, on the main square, by the Ponta Romana, I found Graham Norton. 'Like sucking on sweets', said one of the puffs. I knew Graham Norton when he was twenty or so. He was defensive/derisive then. So I expected him to be wielding his material with some mix of his former self. But no. He was right in his small town mystery and the concoction of his plot. As advised I read  Forever Home at a gallop. It's a deepening puzzle, a domestic mystery plot, with wit, description, decisions and solutions in West Cork, a little emotion, not enough to be frightening, enough to affirm, in view of a positive outcome. Well, Graham, I would hardly have recognized you if you weren't so famous.

The next day we took a long walk along the beach, into the rising mist and the sun. Thinking about footprints and sand, how far we've come, how far to go, to the anchor cemetery where we learn the history of tuna fishing, its energy and then its demise. There's yellow broomrape in the marshes. Broomrape grows on the energy of other plants. Resplendent yellow flowers on a fat stem coming out of nowhere. The tuna do not run any more, straight in April into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, athwart in September, the other way around. Seventy men, fourteen boats that formed a circle in which the massive tuna were trapped. A whole summer of work back then.

On the beach by the tuna cemetery I read the first paragraph of 'The Umbrella' by Tove Ditlevsen, and stopped, so pleased by this quietude, this unpromise. Every usual situation undermined, under threat. The stories in The Trouble with Happiness are very short, no one comes out of them well. Something that was already underway has come to a head and the future will scarcely be different. Writing is more than redemptive. It is a lone signal of being alive. My nephew Tom was in a band called Redemption but did not know what the word meant.

Hallélujah, says the accordion on the Ponta Romana, Tavira, that evening.

There's a wooden hut with a rusty padlock we occupy most of the day on the beach. We have a table for lunch, an old plank. Bread, cheese, tomatoes, olive oil. I read a Tove Ditlevsen story and then lie back. 

On the plane home I am still not ready for Lynne Tillman. My neighbour is a large woman in red who is doing Tesco Sudoku puzzles and eating crackers and chocolate biscuits alternately..  

Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions)

An exchange between Judy Kravis and Laura Fitzgerald 

Hi Laura,

I've been reading your Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions).

Good to see it on the page, with time to mull over your version of land etc.

You are so much of the place, by birth and more, whereas we have come in and made a place our own.

Strong emotions in either case. You by birthright and we by no right, as some would say.

Our immediate neighbours, and we only have one lot, have told us that everyone around here hates us.

Which isn't true, but they'd just like company for their own hatred.

I asked another neighbour a mile or two away, from a small farm in west cork herself, why they hate us.

She said it's because we're english by birth and they think we're better than them.

Becoming irish is no answer. You have to have a couple of people in the ground to be irish, someone told us.

And if you do, it's just another set of problems isn't it ....

Hope the exhibition went well. Do come visit if you're coming this way,

all the best,

Judy xx

Hello Judy,

I think the above email is very much a thing in itself, a container story. It's complex isn't it ... we all do and don't belong. Sure I think I'm probably Norman given the Fitzgerald, who knows who plundered what if you go back far enough ...

Thanks so much for buying a copy of the publication. I'm very glad I was able to make the printed version, the gallery were very good to me.

I hope we can manage to meet up over the summer, yourself and Peter are very welcome to call to us in Inch also. I'm sure Dad would enjoy showing you around.

Thanks for the great email/short story!

Best wishes,

Laura

LEAP DAY

Yesterday afternoon I nearly dozed reading Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, by the stove, entranced by these literate non-sleepers, Kafka, Proust, Duras and many fellows who wrote out of and into their sleeplessness. Nothing like other people's failure to sleep for making you sleepy. This a leap year so we should leap. With friends, if possible. 

the oligarch's son, a harsh male predicament

A few pages into The Man from the Sea by Michael Innes, last of the old green penguin mysteries I've been reading at night, I found this:

Even as he stared at the other naked man he recognised within his own physical response a thrill of pleasure. What had risen from the sea was some harsh male predicament to which he responded as a release.

The one on the beach is naked because he is on, in, an assignation — the dark word still excited him — with the wife of local nouveau laird and scientist, Alex Blair. The man from the sea is a fugitive, a belt about his middle and a wisp of fabric round his loins, his secrets everywhere.

I read The Man from the Sea over a week or so, at night, without interest in the plot or its outcome, pausing where I paused, absorbing the costume and circumstance of new characters, then forgetting them. On the last page the man from the sea, a nuclear scientist with not long to live, walks back into sea in the clothes of the local nouveau laird and scientist, his daughter, not his wife, now the focus, as well as an Australian girl cousin called Georgiana, like someone out of Jane Austen gone walkabout. 

Dovetailed into this in my reading life, an article in the New Yorker called 'The Oligarch's Son', about a boy called Zac Brettler aged nineteen in London, who jumped off a posh balcony near Vauxhall Bridge, in order to live or in order to die, is unclear.  Another harsh male predicament. He changed his name, he was a not-quite from Maida Vale, he thought, a fabulist in a maelstrom of russian and arab rich kids.  He would rather be an oligarch's son, his mother in Dubai, everyone at a distance, various businesses on course. His actual parents in Maida Vale utterly perplexed and sad. 

At the end of The Man from the Sea I'd learned more about the author and his times than about the plot. A nineteen fifties fable. At the end of 'The Oligarch's Son' I've learned the fragility of whoever jumped off the posh balcony, to live or to die, the fabulist teenager in oligarchs' London laundry, in deeper than he could manage. Whether or not he was on heroin is immaterial, who he called and what he googled before jumping off the balcony towards the Thames. To live or to die. All part of the harsh male predicament.

INCURABLE

This afternoon I listened to Daniel Michael Kaiser's translation of incurable into music, a music of disappearing, almost a non-music, DK says. All rhythms were suddenly strange, every pause uncertain. The singing voice dancing over what I wrote and how I have read it out loud, to say nothing of how it took form in the first place. A manifestation of how DK made his way through it, what resonances he found and how the singer sings them.

The best part of listening is I have no words for it. I barely have words for what I write. I listened with bated breath on a broad plain. A thin fabric, translucent, seemingly improvised (although it is not). I wanted to focus on the resonance, he says. The reverb was recorded in an abandoned sugar factory tower.

Hard to listen on the computer, such thin sound. Brings you up short. I wanted to hear this sung version in all its literal resonance, this light incantation, translucent, yes. And all the time I was pulling on what I wrote seven years ago. incurable 'A tense and gnomic journey into the past as it resonates during a difficult long moment in the present, with personal photographs and influential images from the dangerous years of growing up', I said.

BLOG MYSTERIES

At night I have been reading mid-twentieth century mystery novels, the penguins with the green covers, by Margery Allingham, Josephine Bell, Carter Dickson. There was a moment in the 1970s when people I knew were reading mysteries, as well as a brief moment when a well-digger asked me what I wrote— mysteries? No, I said, I write about here, and waved an arm around.

Margery Allingham wrote in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, a few miles from where I grew up. Josephine Bell took medical tripos at Cambridge and poverty in Shadwell Basin. Carter Dickson, one of his names, writes a faux breezy pulp style.

Dream fodder. Expurgation. People running through. He Wouldn't Have Killed Patience? The Port of London Murders. Who wants to know? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. 

The solution is there. Any problem will do.

In a mystery there are so many people with attributes —looks, job, circumstance — in truth I have little patience, but to be led along the mystery of death or deaths is to ignore nearly everything else, which is the whole idea, and only incidentally or par hasard, find what you are looking for. 

Last night I dreamed I looked around at this line of people, that crowd, these few, who would all soon be dead, all of us, I knew — look again, dead again.

SELF-PORTRAITS, AGED THIRTY-ONE

When I was thirty-one I wrote a self-portrait every day for a year. I typed it out, a folder per month, a page or so a day. For example:

I like valleys, not wind, and sea and mountains only on royal days when I'm ready.

What I like best of all is a hand upon my forehead or the world somehow exactly equal to that as I watch from beside a tree.

I'm honestly selfish, and in lucid, plain moments think that others are mostly dishonestly unselfish.

I've always thought I'd never really been hurt. But sometimes I believe I've been hurt on a grand scale.

For a week in March I drew a self-portrait instead. Mostly patterns, one or two words. In July I went to visit my parents. Hand-written and noticeably blunt. I have been clearing out a filing cabinet and found these, among other files, manuscripts, clippings, photographs, envelopes—many envelopes. Hard to know what speed to take a dismantling of this kind. How much to read and how fast. Lecture notes on Pinget, Cocteau, Baudelaire. A story collection called Cacti and Succulents, three copies. Music notes for Monday Night At Home, a radio piece. An early artist book called Suckling Herd, hand-written on a blotting paper book, with tipped-in extracts from the Farmers' Journal.  

Dizzying.

NOT READING BUT FLYING

I knew as I neared the end of Inland by Gerald Murnane, that I would immediately start reading it again now I was attune to the shifting forms and spaces, multiple identities and unfulfilled histories, now I was a fully-fledged reader, I wouldn't need to keep re-reading the beginning, as I did the first time, to settle, as I thought, questions of who was where and in what language, between which rivers, with a view of what kinds of grasslands, inner and outer. This time I would not need to settle anything. As I began, I found I was turning the pages with the joy of dream-flying, Look! no hands, on a bicycle, the glorious understatement of the moment when horses no longer gallop but are said to break into a run.

The boy-man between two streams, on the grasslands, the same and different grasslands, same and different girl-woman, many names, many plants, a science everywhere if you're looking, the more you look the more enraptured and uneasy you become. Gerald Murnane, like Proust, like Virginia Woolf, makes you inhabit your own thoughts in the guise of his. The hungarian puszta, the faux american prairie, the grasslands of Melbourne County, the grasslands beyond where you live, between two creeks that flow down the map but never join up. People live between them and are fashioned by them, they have been ousted and must resettle between another pair of creeks, the same and different. As every person is many people, every name many names, every word many words, every grassland multiple within and without. There is another world but it is inside this one. Gerald Murnane kneads this Eluard line across several pages, stays with it, plays with it in the middle of the book, and we, his readers, often invoked, stay and play too. The room in which we read splits slightly for a moment to show what's inside.

When we were driving around Australia I wrote down the name of every creek we crossed. When I drove round North America in 1980-1, south from New York, west from New Orleans, north from L.A,  east from northern California, I noted all those You Are Now Entering boards at the edge of towns with name, elevation and population. Entering Ideal, South Dakota, elevation 12, Population 57. 

LITTLE WOMEN KNOW THEIR FABRICS

On foot of seeing the last half hour of a film adaptation of Little Women the other day, I started reading the book for the first time since I was maybe ten or twelve. On page 37, a word leapt off the page: spandy. Not sure I've ever had the experience of a word coming to greet me in quite that way, sharp and clear after many many years. I must have liked it when I was twelve or so. I may not have seen it since. According to the OED it is American English and first appeared in 1830. Frequency: 0.01 in a million. Louisa May Alcott comes up as one of the prime users.

The two older girls are getting ready to go to a party. They'll have to wear their poplins, and be presentable.

"Girls, girls! have you both got nice pocket-handkerchiefs? "Yes, yes, spandy nice, and Meg has cologne on hers", cried Jo. "I do believe Marmee would ask that if were all running away from an earthquake."

The March family are poor (somewhat fallen, one gathers). There is much discussion of clothes, especially Meg, the oldest, and Amy, the youngest. Dresses are referred to by the fabric they're made of. The word tarlatan caught my eye later in the book, and my ear. Their poplins, or pops, are the older girls' best  dresses (they yearned after silk, Meg did anyway), there was tarlatan in summer and gingham with sashes. Always gloves. Jo is impatient with all this. As Louisa May was too. But you have to know your fabrics whether you're a little woman or an incipient boy, awkward and antic, always losing hairpins. Dresses were made by a dressmaker then, and mended by the owner. The fabric was the thing, not, as now, the label. There were no labels. If there was a burn or a tear at the back of your dress, you spent as much time as possible against the wall. If one glove was less than perfect, you wore one and carried the other.

By page 239, Meg has her first silk dress. The impossibly sweet Beth has recovered from scarlet fever, the absent father, who has also been ill, has returned from the war. It's a cloying tale. Too much principled goodness, too much Marmee in her corner, faithful servant Hannah, wonderful neighbours, Mr Laurence and grandson Laurie, many references to The Pilgrim's Progress. Goodness winning through, whatever you were wearing.

Louisa May Alcott, like many of her readers, took refuge in Jo, up in her attic, reading and eating apples, playing with the rats — yes. Whenever I have thought of Little Women since I first read it, I have thought of Jo reading and eating apples in the attic — I forgot the rats.

FOU T'SONG PLAYS SCARLATTI

Fou T'Song was the first Chinese pianist to become well known in Europe. In the eighties I saw him on tv playing Scarlatti with such gentleness, his face seraphic. I was new to tv and this was one of its early moments, along with the bbc adaptation of Henry James' The Golden Bowl and The Old Grey Whistle Test.  Later I bought the Scarlatti CD and listen to it when I need to bring the days to size in the early evening. Fou  T'Song is good for managing your reading in deepest January, snowdrops nearly out, frog spawn beginning, lots of indoor time with upstairs reading, nighttime reading, reading in the bath. A great deal of my being is spread out over these books and New Yorkers, Hortus, the newspaper before you light the fire with it, to say nothing of the label on the organic milk, etc. Fou T'Song brings it all together, Eileen Myles' Working Life, mine, Elizabeth Strout's, Elizabeth Taylor's. Elizabeth Strout has said that when she meets people she absorbs their molecules and that is how she is able to write her characters. Elizabeth Taylor, half a century earlier, english rural middle class, does not have the concept of molecules. Eileen Myles does  not have the concept of character. She is on her own planet. I absorb their molecules, all of them. Often on the same day. That's where Fou T'Song and his seraphic smile come in.