ACTS OF THE BODY

In the nineteen seventies a number of long novels written about twenty years before were reissued, including the works of Patrick White in Australia, John Cowper Powys in Wales, and Thomas Wolfe in America, all of them works that slowly emerge from what feels like the long, nearly cosmic or mythic breath of a place. None of them, since then, has shown through in my walks along the bookshelves as a potential reread, until this long indoor period with very little coming into my reading life through the post or any other way, which led to my going back to Patrick White. As with other rereading lately, unleavened by work outdoors, I am easily irritated, less by the telling than by the reader I was in the nineteen seventies, and possibly the writer I was then, too. Though an ancient doggedness prevails and, after The Aunt's Story I read The Tree of Man, grateful for anything that goes on this long, with a slow sense of ageing and inevitability, great evidence of people's bodies, as if to set them forever as thin, yellowing, travelling, possibly mad aunt, or thickening, solidifying worthy farmer of few words, and his worthy wife, doubtful children, their places in what had been a wilderness and gradually became a town, with post office and motor cars. 

What then was wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. This is my life, he would have said if he had expressed himself other than by acts of the body.

The other day D said she didn't like novels because she didn't like feeling the presence of the author. She thought it always sounded pompous. It wasn't the moment for discussion but I would like to some time. Is it pompous to create characters who cannot express themselves, for whom the sudden discovery of a dragonfly on a mulberry leaf has to stand in place of all that they might say, if they could, about their lives together? The Tree of Man is nearly five hundred pages long. And most of the characters decide, where possible, to say nothing.

 

BOOKSHELVES

I dreamed I went to stay for a few days in a hotel and installed in my room the bricks and planks that for many years I used as bookshelves, complete with an array of books to feed my habit and defend me against all-comers. This, perhaps, because for the last few weeks of revolving 'flu I have read a considerable number of books, mostly early Penguins, by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville West, the latter the earliest and least worthy, Penguin number 16. When I left the hotel I took the books but forgot the bricks and planks and then had to make elaborate arrangements to retrieve them. As when I first came to Ireland I brought my bricks and planks with me, thinking it would be easier to have bookshelves ready to install, and as it turned out, southern Ireland was not rich in clay and so rather short of bricks, especially bricks of character, so my foresight was justified.

I often turn to early and mid-twentieth century novels, all of them variously cracking and reinforcing upper class codes of behaviour, especially when I'm ill. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh knew each other well; they were of a kind, he far more caustic than she, and broader, more able for savagery, and, eventually, depth. After Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, all short, derisive books, and still in bed with a violent headache, in need of larger narrative in order to find these past months of my own life, I read Brideshead Revisited, and, once past the Oxford posing and spending and drinking, and beyond, or inside, the tv adaptation I loved in the eighties, or was it nineties, found myself fully involved, to my surprise, in the ghastly turmoil of Catholicism.

Evelyn Waugh is strangely serious when he is. I read Brideshead during the worst of my third 'flu, the whole book in not much more than twenty-four hours, and felt almost as convinced of the grave hold of Catholicism on people's lives as the narrator, Charles Ryder, aka Jeremy Irons. Uncomprehending but acknowledging. Ireland has not made me think about Catholicism in the same way. It's too much part of the fabric, along with the music and the language and myriad daily habits; whereas Evelyn Waugh's involvement with English Catholicism represented a dive out of the meaningless into the mystery and the sadness.

Reading in tune with 'flu

 During 'flu part one I did not read at all, I coughed. My head ached. All the bodily weaknesses I've ever known came through and made themselves heard. 'Flu part two, still coughing, I read voraciously, that same body needing the balance of a reading head. Books that have gathered in recent weeks are re-read, newly porous. Pavese's The Beautiful Summer I read for its title, for any pitch-perfect version, however poignant, of a beautiful summer.  

I asked Annette what her comfort reading was, and she said the Mapp and Lucia books and Nancy Mitford. I read The Pursuit of Love in a day, Love in a Cold Climate the next day. There is little to equal this kind of reading. Especially a long way north of a beautiful summer. Nancy Mitford's pitch is reassuring. She allows you to be where you have never been, in a large house full of children who meet in a warm upstairs cupboard where they establish the boundaries then ignore them, for the rest of their lives.

Why is this so comfortable? In Mitfordland the template is there. The warm upstairs cupboard, the grumpy Fa, the aunts, their husbands, the dogs the horses the rich acquaintance, the useful heir. One of those small groups that, when you need it, can be an entire borrowed world, and just the thing to tide you over. 

For a corrective, apply Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Penguin number 75. From Mitfordland to Metroland. I read the schooldays first part much too fast. Evelyn Waugh was obnoxious then. After Nancy Mitford this was too much. Later, as I coughed less, I read more slowly. The irritant was in me so I could afford to ignore it. The odyssey of Paul Pennyfeather through public school and Oxford is just the thing to pull you out of 'flu. His fall is more compelling than his decline. He is manipulated by everyone, but works through it in that circular, stupid way we all enact sooner or later, back to our beginnings via the grotesqueries we have been pushed through, a spell in prison the very thing. 

THE LURE OF THE SENTENCE

 From Virginia Woolf losing hairpins along Piccadilly, to Gerald Murnane of Inner, Outer and Other Australia, The Plains, the sentence has the structure of home, endlessly running on even as it stands still. 

Every few pages of The Plains, there's some or another thing — to use one of Gerald Murnane's favourite phrases —that brings you to a halt.

"And then the door from the street was flung open and a new group of plainsmen came in from the dazzling sunlight with their afternoon's work done and settles themselves at the bar to resume their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth."

It's ghostly reading Gerald Murnane as a blow-in in Ireland. His scrutiny of the plains (he doesn't like the definite article in titles) which he doesn't know except through the prowess of his imagination, includes Ireland. What a roundabout route to find out where you live. An Irish-Australian, or Australian-Irish, at his typewriter, looking for the plains, the plain of his imagination.

Here is our narrator learning to assimilate in a bar:

"They were all in a condition that I had expected to reach myself after a few more pots of beer. They had lost little of their customary dignity. Perhaps they spoke a trifle too emphatically or gestured too readily. As I understood it from my own experiences with alcohol, they had drunk themselves sober."

We were in a pub overnight in North Kerry some years ago. We'd gone to look into a per cent for art project and happened on a funeral, stayed the night.The family were in extremis: 'I'm so drunk I'm coming round to being sober again,' said the daughter, thin, black-haired, late on in the evening. We saw her next morning, wigless, pale and bereft.

I finished The Plains and started it again a few days later.