Russian influence

The last story in Elephant, a selection of Raymond Carver stories, is an imagining of Tchekov's death, over a glass of champagne, which led me back to Aldo Buzzi Tchekov in Sondrio, followed by JM Coetzee's imagining of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg. Reading in January has a russian influence. Follow it. 

Chekhov died at forty-four. Since the age of twenty-eight, he had suffered from insomnia, and he treated it by drinking a bottle of beer every night, often of bad quality. He thought that he was descended from the artisan Andrei Chokhov, who cast the colossal cannon (the czar of cannons, which never succeeded in firing) that is in the garden of the Kremlin, near the czar of bells, an enormous bell, broken during casting, which never succeeded in ringing—symbols, in Chekhov's words, of that "Russian tendency to spend money in the construction of every kind of uselessness when the most pressing human needs are not yet satisfied". 

RAYMOND CARVER

Deep in my re-reads of Patrick White, Thomas Wolfe and John Cowper Powys, I remembered Raymond Carver, the brevity of his writing, aided and abetted by Gordon Lish, his editor; I needed to read something radically edited, writing that stayed close to the bone, as Jane Fonda liked to say of her body.

What do we talk about when we talk about love. We talk about cigarettes and alcohol and our individual histories. We talk in the domestic context. We empty the ashtray. Someone is about to leave or has left. Various splintered families, always in the name of something almost nobody has, something that isn't there when the story ends. And the story ends. Patience gives out. Narrative stasis has been achieved. The next story will echo this one. 

Wolf Solent — an excruciating read

With the best will in the world — from my first reading I remembered only a rural girl who could whistle like a blackbird — I re-read Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys and found it excruciating — overwrought — I liked the searching, exhaustive and ecstatic in 1966 — all names and intrigue and yearning for the absolute — Squire Urquhart compiling a sordid history of Dorset, Wolf Solent assisting, ghosting, eagerly enacting a modern counterpart — sordid if you like, or confused — with rural girls and other men and women— without let or scruple — essence of girl and the other, kindred spirit.

I read rapidly through the six hundred plus pages, wanting to rest with some character or other, only at the very end realising that the character I wanted to rest with was me, the reader who lapped this up once. 

SELF-ABSORPTION

Eugene Gant, Thomas Wolfe's narrator in Look Homeward, Angel enters the theatre of human events in 1900, a new start at the foot of a page of dead heroes. The first noun in the novel is destiny. Five hundred lusty, overripe pages of family life with Eugene at the centre, ensue. 

We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old. p. 33

Thomas Wolfe, Eugene, wrote himself large. In the womb he was already a man. For the next thirty-eight years he wrestles with it. He protests. He observes. He describes.

The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; p. 177

You could edit these five hundred pages down to five and there your Eugene Gant would be, stripped to yet unknown essentials.

He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad. p. 267

You could turn Thomas Wolfe into Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver into Thomas Wolfe.

Walled up in the great city of his visions, his tongue has learned to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. .... He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged to the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. p. 319

 By page 482 Eugene Gant is nineteen. The Angel is in the rearview mirror. 

But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of his blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning. p. 482

Oh but there was.