LAST LETTER TO A READER

I began Gerald Murnane's Last Letter to a Reader with a sense of relief, as one coming into the home passage, not walking nor sinking, knowing the way. These are sentences that carry me, even if, by the time I am halfway through the book I am a little tired of finding myself in this writing fabric, his, and also, with hardly a twitch of the tale, mine as well. I have always had a ready diffidence where words are concerned. The levelness, evenness of Gerald Murnane's account of his writing and reading self, eventually gets to me; and I would rather watch a movie.

Re-reading Pavese straightaway

The House on the Hill sounds so homey/inappropriate you forget the title until you start reading the book again. Re-reading is for pause times. Every other day is so wet you can float off, no trouble. Pavese's house on the hill is embedded in world war two. It is temporary, fragile, freighted, has two landladies and a dog, Belbo, several pasts and theatres (of war), domestic habits still in place. Food is prepared, crops harvested and provisions made, magazzini stocked, expectations nurtured. Turin, below, is on fire. Then teaching resumes. What does our narrator teach? Does he teach the house on the hill, the bar Le Fontane where the partisans meet, the child Dino, old girlfriend Cate. What is a partisan?

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

The long and the short of it, in 1940s novels from Brooklyn and Piedmont, Italy.

The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which took several weeks to read, in the insomniac hours. Reading a 1940s bestseller takes the place of sleep. The growing tree, mentioned at judicious intervals, is ailanthus or tree of heaven; enough said. 

The short is The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese, which I'm halfway through in a day. The house on the hill is outside Turin in 1943, wartime; enough said. I have read other Pavese and recognise these houses, these hills, these women, his ghosts; perpetual edginess that the war confirms.

This is an ungainly tango. Forget blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Betty Smith and Cesare Pavese are more serendipitous, less felicitous. I can read a bestseller from 1944 and not a bestseller from 2025 (sauf a Graham Norton novel a couple of years ago; special pleading there). I like slim Italian literature from the 1940s and 1950s, much of it written by depressives. With a fascist state in your history, you're barely able to look ahead.

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

I stubbed my toe on the wood box in the night and so was laid up for the day, which was all wind and sugar as they used to say. I read The End of Me by Alfred Hayes end to end beside the stove and was well pleased. The limping slowed me down. After my visit to Essex I had a whole geophysical childhood to absorb. Reading someone else's tale can oil your own.

I have read two other novels by Alfred Hayes. Less novels than trajectories — I have always had trouble saying that word — poem hardly easier — and Alfred Hayes has a poetic trajectory. He makes for the end of himself with plenty ellipses so that you end at the last chapter at last light, spent as he is.