Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad

An article in The New Yorker about Mark Twain sent me to the bedroom bookshelves to see what I had. Tom Sawyer was too big a volume for outdoor reading and A Life on the Mississippi or A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur too decayed to be disturbed. The article characterised America as half-grown, like Huck Finn. I chose The Innocents Abroad. 

Innocents Abroad were innocents indeed. Or Mark Twain is a careless showman feeding an eager audience. My undated, pirated edition from London, a pinched hardback look, tight print occasionally blurry, especially at the bottom of the page. The innocents, rich enough to pay a thousand dollars for this bash into the unknown: over the bumpy Atlantic, stopping at the Azores, and then Gibraltar, Tangiers, France, Italy, a disparate group constantly off on side-trips to Paris, London or Switzerland, reconvening in Genoa, on to Rome. 

I watched The Talented Mr Ripley the other night: more innocents abroad, rich innocents. Wealth does bring a kind of innocence; there's so much you don't see when you're rich. You travel under R, and that's just the beginning of the false pretences.

I enjoyed Mark Twain at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at Versailles, where he marvelled at the precision that made up the general effect of the clipped trees. Then he's on to Milan, gazing at The Last Supper, telling his readers what they're supposed to think and undermining them. He's a digester of culture; as he raises a masterpiece he drops it.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand—and more especially I cannot understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depôts and such marvels of turnpikes. Why, these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line as smooth as a floor, and as white as snow.

 Then Venice. 

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they battled ... the Autocrat of Commerce ... Mother of Republics ...

He stayed at the Grand Hotel d'Europe. The talented Mr Ripley rents a palazzo. Then Rome. Mark Twain is a digester. Reader's Digest. We last see Mr Ripley on a boat to Greece, travelling under R.

what if there is no story

Her side of the story by Alba de Céspedes, mid 20th century Italy, the anti-fascist sector. I became impatient with her side of the story, and indeed his. Halfway through I found I was galloping. I only wanted to know what happened and I didn't even want that.

Instead I read Steps by Maurice Scully, late 20th century Ireland, Lesotho, Italy, early 2lst.

Nothing is nothing. I am the perfect citizen.

Finitude is rubbish, everybody knows that.

No wonder the secret police are busy. Phone me

(to lie in bed Understanding Poetry) phone me

when you get back 

DANCING FLIES

I finished Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane, read the first few pages again, then watched the dancing flies above the pond, buffeted now and then by a northeast breeze whenever the sun went behind a cloud; the massed flies buffeting, in their turn, the whirligig beetles. You stand more chance of following a whirligig beetle than a dancing fly, if you can choose one dancing fly in the thick of the dance. 

Dancing flies — their real name — do not bite, do not land, they dance, and now and then concede to the breeze. I look into them, trying to choose one and happily fail as they swing southwest in a rush of billows.

For some days I've been thinking what I'd like to say about reading Gerald Murnane, his phrases/places that are his points de repère and the impetus of reading him. Those small bursts of wind that seem to confer order, or rhythm, or conviction, among the dancing flies, bring his writing, his reading/writing/remembering, into just the right not quite focus.