FOE DEFOE & COETZEE: one black beetle knows another

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera. 

There's a new mighty volume on Defoe. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. He would love that. He who was the eighteenth century in English letters, has engendered a handbook. I read a review in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fact Man'. 

Defoe could talk to Everybody in Their Own way. He had fingers in many pies, he'd been there, done, or knew someone who had, he was a one-man band, a self-publicist. JM Coetzee plugs into Daniel Foe, into Cruso, and Friday; into his reading. His writing literally emerges from his reading, as from Adam's rib. Gathering his own hinterland into the weave: South Africa, America, Australia. 

J.M. Coetzee looks the same in all his portraits, as if he were already a portrait, a portrait of a portrait, a stab at a portrait, three-quarter view, three-quarter darkness. Giving away less and less with every iteration.

After a swift read of the slender Foe, I started the only other Coetzee book I have, Elizabeth Costello; which I found painful. No, I kept thinking, no you don't have to do it this way. In fact, drop it all, do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

I did pass GO. I read the whole book, with a deepening revulsion/understanding. There are many ways of inhabiting books; one black beetle knows another; yes. Elizabeth Costello is a black beetle; as is J.M. Coetzee; as I am. But once we're there, in the black beetle arena of books and reading, we're as different as we can be. Difference is what makes us black beetles in the first place. We need to differentiate as we go along. Constructing and undermining with every move, every word.

the beautiful boy always dies

In the novels of James Purdy, the beautiful boy always dies. In The Nephew, his second novel, Cliff is missing in action in Korea, and then dead; in Malcolm, his first novel, the eponymous, very young man who waits on a bench, can only die after being claimed by a succession of eccentrics; in In a Shallow Grave, Daventry, with hair the colour of corn silk, and possibly otherworldly powers, is plastered to a pine tree in a hurricane.

Malcolm is his most famous novel, and the one I liked least. James Purdy has his device: a fifteen year old who lives in a hotel and waits on a bench for his father, perhaps, and meets a succession of people who all find him irresistible but have troubles of their own and sometimes he doesn't come first in their needs. He marries one of them (her third husband), and then dies, and for this reader it is more of a convenience than a climax. 

The Nephew is a small town novel. I have a soft spot for tales of small town life: somewhat suppressed and wistful older folk who are forced to learn secrets they'd rather not know, constantly adjusting to the shifts in the tone of neighbourhood life brought by each new revelation. 

In a Shallow Grave, a war veteran needs looking after, the beautiful boy is Potter Daventry, of mysterious, possibly violent past, he sees beyond the raw mulberry skin of Garnet Montrose until one is permanently attached to the other. Daventry dies and Garnet's skin returns to a more normal colour, beyond death, as if by transfer of atoms.

I read these three novels nine years ago. All at once. Some elusive writers you have to take hold of a few books at once. James Purdy is elusive. His books are full of applicants and supplicants, a shifting crowd of emigrants who always lose their centre; that's what always happens. The beautiful boy, hair the colour of cornsilk, will die instead of you. 

LOWLIFE TANGO: Damon Runyon and Nelson Algren

What am I doing with the pit of the year? Guys and Dolls set up several wet/windy/cold afternoons; a present from Gertie to my parents in 1958, a Broadway romp like Dickens on rollerskates; I missed it already when I finished it, but thought about talky books in general, and lives a long way from mine, in particular, like a writer whose name I couldn't remember at first, but, having decided to go along the bookshelf starting with A, I soon found: Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side.

To read Nelson Algren you have to drop your pitch and raise your game. Instead of Broadway, you have box car, flophouse, areaways, a low tight focus, painful syncopation of day to day progress, or not. Instead of Spanish John and Nicely Nicely Jones, you have Kitty Twist and Dove Linkhorn and Big Stingaree, Out Front and Natural Bug. They mill around Perdido Street in New Orleans, the summer of 1931, country boys and daddy-o's, waifs and strays and halfies, old Europe and self-made panders, looking for the next quarter, tenspot, C-note, querying everything.

'Give me animals, at least they know what they're doing. Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

Do you know about elephants, how they come on?' she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

If you'd stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you're saying,' the wool-tie sport suggested.

Well', the girl explained, 'I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk 'n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn't be no elephants.

'So what?'

'Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they're doing.'

Dove Linkhorn is our guide, barefoot, letterless — he has only reached B by the time he reaches New Orleans. He has a moment with Kitty Twist, 17 year-old runaway, in a playground.

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

'Just let me know when you've had enough, Red. I got all day.'

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn't had nearly enough.

'Catch me when I come down!' he warned her from the top of a chute.

And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck.

After more than two hundred pages Dove Linkhorn is studying M and N, with the help of Hallie Breedlove, ex- of Legless Schmidt. Nelson Algren goes the distance; his language is what we read. Sounds obvious, but but never more so than here. By the time Dove Linkhorn, or Red, or Tex, is reading, and listening, we have learned his language, and can read as he does.

Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody's pappy got entirely drownded. Full fathom five Thy father lies.

So when, fully literate, he is smashed by halfy Legless Schmidt, we are aghast.

'I like to get up close to accidents' Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove's broken mouth, that was trying to speak through swallowing blood.

Blind, Dove Lindhorn goes back to his village in Texas. 

This afternoon all my roof windows are closed by snow.