JD Salinger and Anne Carson, at dusk

I like to have a bath early evening, to divide the day. I read, for preference, the New Yorker. Today Jill Lepore remembered a house she lived in as a student in Boston with fluid others and shouty neighbours, several cats. Then, up in my room, in front of the stove I look again at Franny and Zooey. In the middle of the night last night I read the letter Zooey reads from his older brother Buddy, near the start of the Zooey section of the book. Zooey is reading in the bath, the letter resting on his dry knees. A well-thumbed letter, four years old. Some family is worth hanging onto. JD Salinger is a voice from my library, wearing his cleverness, like Zooey, like a wooden leg.

Anne Carson is adept at deploying her wooden leg. I have had Plainwater out for some weeks now, and this evening was the start of 'Canicula di Anna', which she rapidly inhabits so that several pages in she speaks for Anna, a creature of renaissance Italy as much as for herself; she is not concerned what we think. Any more than any of us in last night's dream as we clambered about our business. P swam the length of a cold pond. There were clouds of paper in the bedroom. And one of P's former students.

Corgi Height: twelve inches above the ground

An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he says, quartering the lane, chasing rabbits. Hedgerows, cornfields, hop-gardens and apple orchards on either side. He is recalled from his meditations by a yelp of pain and fear from a field away. The Corgi needed help. Kentish hedges were high and dense.

Finally I took off my coat, and pushed it before me through the hedge. ... Bramble and eglantine parted before me, and the cruel spines of the hawthorn. The coat saved my face, but from one or two back-lashings of briar sprays I caught some feline scratches on hands and wrists. And an ankle suffered too.

He finds his dog four or five feet through a thicket, beside a stream, caught in rusty wire in front of the rabbit burrow, whimpering. The only way to get to his dog was to lie down on his belly and make his way, slug-like, muddy and wet through the open space between the ground and the bottom growth of the thicket.

There we lay together, a muddy pair. Now I had to get him out. ... it was not so easy ... I looked about me, to realise that for once I was looking at the world from below, from Corgi height ... the smallest weed, the speck of dust, magnified, or conversely the whole world dwarfed to the compass of this patch of woodland and meadow-fall ... I was looking at the universe from below.

I read several of the pieces in Small Moments, by Richard Church, to see why I'd bought the book whenever I did — some drift towards small, towards moments, the ivory paper with wood-engravings, all this would have seduced me, if to be seduced is to understand only this much — then the story of the Corgi chasing rabbits and the civil servant/poet pushing through a hedge and a thicket, confirmed that this was an other person's rendering of what I know, what William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and so many ruralists and poets, know also. Then it's just a question of how you like your eggs. 

THE WHATSAPP DIARY

I read an article by Sam Knight in the New Yorker about whatsapp. I read it in several goes, unable to pursue it start to finish. Each time I started at a different point and registered a different thought about our detachment from our lives, the saturation of that detachment, the loss of solitude. We are — you are, I don't have a phone — all writing diaries on our phones, wallpapering our current lives with phatic white noise, ready for the moment of total amnesia. Which has already arrived. 

25 million times a second after the World Cup in Dubai, whatsapp buzzed. A new fabric of the earth. 

I write a diary. With a pen on paper. A fountain pen, with ink, paper of a certain size and texture. For many years I wrote every day, and cheated if I missed a day. Now I write every day or two or three. And it's gnomic or banal. The gnomic I need to write. No one is reading it. I'm talking to myself. The banal is, yes, banal, and crucial to sanity. Descriptions of stasis and departure are crucial. Frogspawn and pussy willow. The back of the cat looking out at a hooded crow. Wake up.

WhatsApp is phatic before anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app's servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing.

A Polish ethnographer, Bronisław Malinowski, a 1922 book coined the phrase 'phatic communion' for those idle phrases we exchange in recognition of our common humanity and which dissolve on impact, or used to. Except now, on WhatsApp, they don't, they stay there forever in data centres where night and day they consume electricity and water to cool our communal fever. 

 

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.