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.