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.