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.