Death Row, Texas, Global Indignation

In three consecutive baths I read an article by Lawrence Wright  in the New Yorker about a group of women on death row in Texas. I hadn't thought to read it but then I did. How does the New Yorker celebrate its centenary but with this enormous iniquity: women who seem to have done terrible things but if you consider their lives, their early years of abuse and neglect, if these women have killed someone it is equal to their having been killed, slowly, from the beginning, so any crime, so-called, any evil, any darkness clinging to them is hardly their own, and that's what they must die for.

J. M. Coetzee, Booker books

Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1999, and only now, in 2025, I read it, and find myself impatient with the plottedness, careful and incisive as it is, historical and compassionate, forcefully engaged with maleness and its needs, mindful of history, careful —and distracted — with family.  

In the last week or two I have read Coetzee's three autobiographical books: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and dipped into his correspondence with Paul Auster.  How he dealt with himself there is somehow more palatable than the fiction structure built in Disgrace around David Lurie, Communications Lecturer, twice divorced, etc, to allow him to think around himself. I couldn't take the opera that Professor Lurie was writing about Byron's latter years. Does he really need to concoct an opera around his baser instincts.

That's why I don't read Booker Prize novels. I feel forced into a bottomless query. I'd rather be out routing compost heaps. 

The Moon and the Bonfires — Cesare Pavese

You have to read books twice in February. The mist is down. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese you'd have to read twice at any time of year. I read the first chapter twice, to begin with. Twenty years on a man returns to the Piedmont hills and farms where he grew up, legitimate now he's rich, redeemed, staying in the Hotel Angelo, walking the old lands with his old friend Nuto. This is a climate more than a story. He might be staying in the hotel, he might buy a farm, for now he buys a penknife for a crippled boy. That could be me, he thought. Even with the leg. Not so much reading, more temperature-taking, making an even way of words through a troubled past.

Only on the second reading do I sense the geography of it, the different farms, the people who lived there, which vineyard had which grape, who lay with whom, and died of it. There is no future here, despite repeated attempts. 

I have been watching the BBC adaptation of Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of the first BBC series I ever watched (the other was The Golden Bowl). I was entranced by this time spent in a life I couldn't have known, but did. Long vistas of lowlands, a  presbyterian stoicism, fed on porridge in a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon, a wooden plough tilling the low land, a marriage an evening party and then there's the outdoor work to do next morning.

Once you've read that Cesare Pavese was not the creature that he wrote, he was not an illegitimate bastard but he felt like one, his nickname was not Eel, but he felt like an eel, he slithered around with none of the eel's savoir faire. He contemplated  his old friend Nuto, who had not left, had not made his fortune but carried on.

He might have wound up as many do in this valley, growing like a plant, getting old like a woman or a goat, without knowing anything of life the other side of the Bormida, without ever stepping out of the routine oaf home and grape-picking and village fairs. But though he never travelled, something did happen for Nuto, a destiny of sorts — I mean this idea he has that you have to understand things, that the world is all wrong and it's in everyone's interest to change things.

BOYHOOD: inside the Coetzee chill

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.

Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives? 

It takes a while. 

I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation. 

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy. 

Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder.  ....

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

 It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.

MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

She stood among the circles and colours of Richard Gorman paintings, her flared patched jeans down to the floor, a brick-orange beanie, light hazel eyes, among light flicks at her phone her sweatshirt read Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Yes, I thought, I didn't have it written across my chest above my flared trousers when I was twenty, but it was my home ground.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turns out to be a song by Smashing Pumpkins. Infinite sadness, according to wiki-google-etc, is a form of anxiety that can be remedied with the right drugs. They are missing the art of sadness, the occupation of melancholy. Private, inarticulate, infinite sadness remains intact. That's the beauty of it. 

The Library at Castlemartyr Resort

The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fifties green and pale sateen, the flowers are white carnation with baby breath, one flask per table.

I had saved The Pole for our stay at Castlemartyr. J.M. Coetzee, in portrait as in pages, is forbidding, and so is the narrative; we ease into it, unwillingly at first. We accompany Mr Coetzee's gradual acceptance of the story he tells, his easing into it by numbering short paragraphs, then longer pages, till the numbers are no different from chapter headings, and the chill gives way, at the last, to tenderness. 

The Pole is a Polish pianist with an unpronounceable name, a Chopin specialist. The woman is Beatriz. Likened, and not, to Dante's Beatrice.

Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come.

The books in the library at Castlemartyr are faded Dickens, book club Daphne du Maurier, a little Shakespeare (and I saw a mentor's Macbeth by a table in the hall) (our room has a softened hardback Irish  Civil War on the table under the tv). There are coffee table books about baking and preserving, a florid volume of Dangerous things for Boys. The only other person there that afternoon was a young man, recently a boy, at his laptop who never looked up. I wonder who had the task of fitting out The Library with books.

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.