The Reading Trail

Spending a couple of weeks at home on my own, I read as if maintaining a necessary substrate: with meals, between meals, before sleep, during insomnia. I have read two novellas by Henry James, three novels by Muriel Spark and her autobiography, whose evocation of publishing in postwar Britain led to Diana Athill's memoir Stet, which is about the same thing, and may in turn, through its chapter on Jean Rhys, take me back to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Entrenched in my own life, weather and upkeep, I need these versions of elsewhere, the parallel existence of other people. And I need it to be written. Novels write it, poems write it, memoirs write about it. Diaries take the plunge, eyes closed. All good. 

Diana Athill writes about Jean Rhys, and how, in her last years, she struggled to finish Wide Sargasso Sea. She could hardly speak but she could see the words she wanted to add. The pages of the novel had a physical photovoltaic existence, including all future amendments.

Muriel Spark read Henry James

I'd been reading Henry James and switched to Muriel Spark who also read Henry James, and, in Loitering With Intent, pulls herself up short for writing something Henry James would have written. She steers her writing passage through all she has read and all she has lived. She's abrasive and cool, if not nasty. Switched from being jew-ish to full Roman Catholicism. She was my parents' generation. They talked about Memento Mori with their friends circa 1960 — a novel in which everyone dies — with an excited contemporaneity beyond my emotional age. I took note. I re-read Muriel Spark rarely enough to forget the plots and often enough to know how this kind of wryness works, where she is in relation to what she writes, how she digs and evades. She's there all the time, that's for sure. The hand of Muriel is on yours from the start.

Henry James & Mahler

First The Spoils of Poynton then What Maisie Knew. As always with Henry James a materiality — the spoils of Poynton are priceless therefore must ultimately go up in smoke — and a bottomless enquiry. What poor dear Maisie knows is bottomless. She has two mothers two fathers and two governesses. As far as family can be stretched, she stretches it in her mind's eye: who is lying, who is afraid of whom and why, who will vanish or transform next. Now a governess then a stepmother.

Always an excess of love amid the sundering and reshaping of protofamilies. Life is for constant unpicking as it happens: is this Mr Merriam or Lord Eric or the Count or the Captain. Who will the next father be. What of the battle to be Maisie's mother.

Is it possible to write about reading Henry James without writing like Henry James.

While listening to Janet Baker sing Mahler songs.

Letters to her daughter, Madame de Sévigné

I have few leather-bound gilded books, and only the letters of Madame de Sévigné were a gift, not made directly to me, but at one remove. A friend of my mother's had a maiden aunt in Paris, whom I visited once. She may have been called Miss Hogan, and she lived in the longest street in Paris, the rue de Vaugirard. I was twenty, and shy. She was in her seventies, and served a formal tea. After she died, a few years later, my mother's friend suggested I might like the Madame de Sévigné volume, as well as three large linen pillowcases. I was, and am still touched that my mother's friend, whose children I babysat when I was a teenager, thought I was a candidate for linen pillowcases and seventeenth century letters. But she judged well. The pillowcases are in use on the sofa in the new room where we sometimes read or nap in summer. 

I have read Madame de Sévigné a few times. This time, in this in-between season, has been perhaps the most poignant. I have relished the firmly vertical Didot font and the thick pages, unevenly cut and difficult to turn, which made my reading even slower and more careful. It's many years since I was in the habit of reading french this old, but I made my way into it, not worrying when there were phrases I didn't quite understand. It was a relief to feel at this distance from the intimate though formal speech of a seventeenth century aristocrat. Perhaps even the formality, the past historic tenses correctly used, the words I no longer knew, brought this mother's longing to be with her daughter into even sharper focus. The mother lived in the north of France, the daughter in Provence. Even a journey from Brittany to Paris took many days.

We were in Cork a few days ago, meeting our new cabin guest. As she waited for her bag to be unloaded from the bus, we watched a mother-daughter reunion, the long hug and tears of joy, the slight pull back now and then as they looked at each other after long absence, maybe the summer, maybe longer.

 

Madame de Sévigné in Peru

My mother liked The Bridge of San Luis Rey but I didn't till now. It sounded real and that wasn't what I was looking for when I was growing up. Now, many years later, and twenty, maybe, since my mother died, I pull it out of the shelves, fourteenth printing of 1928, Bloomsburyish loose cover and wide, chalky pages, and it turns out to be what I need to underpin my shaky nights.

Five people fall to their death when an ancient rope bridge collapses in Peru. Father Juniper undertakes to find out who they were and maybe assert the justice of their death, or situate death such that the reader might ponder. The seventeenth century tone — think Madame de Sévigné's letters to her daughter — except in this case the daughter did not love her mother — au contraire — is seductive in the middle of the night. This is just the reading I need.