detective stories?

Amanda Cross is the pen name of Carolyn Heilbrun, first woman tenured professor at Columbia. Academics I knew forty years ago read detective stories; they recommended Amanda Cross. Here was an academic at her leisure, I'd like it, I needed to have my mind numbed by a puzzle, they implied, to counteract the everyday conundrum of life. Maybe I did. 

This week I saw mention of Carolyn Heilbrun in the New Yorker or the NYRB. I was sleepless after watching the final episode of the 7Up series. Detective stories are the best medicine. The relentless, witty, ironic puzzle is disappointing; calming because disappointing; I don't care who did it or why and that's a relief. I might sleep now.

Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch, Revisited

'William Burroughs recommended Denton Welch to students, perhaps as material ready to be cut up, each phrase or word a bright shiny object that could find itself next to new neighbours and lose none of its patina.'

Denton Welch likes bright shiny objects, he's already a collector, at 17, bargaining in the chinese interior in the early nineteen-thirties for old porcelain and curios. Even on the boat going out, he began.

In the Red Sea I wrote a poem ....  I had just come on deck with my drawing-book and I saw them (the burnt-up mountains) crumbling in long lines to the sea. They were like piles of brown sugar, everlasting and fierce, sticking up out of the sea. .... I leant on the rail and scribbled in my drawing-book. What I wrote seemed almost perfect.

He has run away from school and is now on a boat to china to join his father. He's an aesthete, which is to say, a hidden soul delighting in the surface of things. Here he is drinking tea:

Each cup had a lid, and when I lifted mine I saw whole leaves swimming in the water like a school of fishes. They were pale green. Some had not yet uncurled. I watched them opening with pleasure, and I thought we missed a lot in England by not leaving the tea-leaves in our cups. To watch them swirling and drifting is like watching the smoke from a cigarette. And what is smoking in the dark?

Denton Welch was hit by a car while cycling in Surrey, and suffered a fractured spine. He died at thirty-three. Not sure what brought me to Maiden Voyage this time. Maybe the need to travel without travelling, in the Finnish way. 

Aug 9 — Fog

I opened Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan and found, first time and every time thereafter, a daily life that spoke for all daily lives. 

Terrible windy    everything loose

is traveling

Kathryn Scanlan lived for fifteen years with a diary she found at an estate sale in Illinois, written by a woman in her eighties. This is all you need to know of a stranger, of yourself. Brevity is the entire soul towards the end.

 He called. Not so good. Bleeding

Again. Trying to knit pincushion.       

I have written a diary since I was fourteen, sifted days onto pages. Cora Lacy, in a small town in Illinois, between 1968 and 1972, kept a five-year diary, which later came into the possession of Kathryn Scanlan, who didn't read it for some years, and then when she did, absorbed it and gradually chose it, contorted, ordered and cut it. Every time I open the book I read a sufficient phrase.

D took cactus to basement

I think of the end of my mother's letters, the way she ran through a few concerns then slowed to a coda as she looked out of the window and wrote: the crocuses are starting to come out. That was the part I liked. Observation that quieted the concerns.

Fine snow rabbit got away. I took

pictures of the frost   ever where

beautiful

Kathryn Scanlan does not picture the diary writer; after fifteen years of re-reading, re-forming this inexhaustible textbook she came upon by chance, she possessed it; she doesn't know Cora Lacy, she is her.  And so am I. 

Turning cooler in eve. We had

smoked sausages, fried potatoes & 

onions. Dr. says it's a general 

breaking up of his body. I am

bringing in some flowers.

 

INVENTION & TRUTH

Why one kind of self-examination and not another, in a book? Chez Sara Baume, I don't recognise her past, only her present, workaday West Cork, with cold swims and tea, the sayable stratum of our journalling world. Whereas I recognise Andrea Bajani, I recognise his family, whence he comes, his anguish and persistence. Twenty pages into The Anniversary he identifies his mother independent of his father; he puts her in the kitchen talking to her friends.

What they talked about as they sat in our kitchen matters less than the fact that now, as I write about it, I can see my mother separately from my father. Which is to say that the act of writing, of chipping away, word by word, at that monolith of family memory taken up wholly by him, succeeds in extracting my mother from the rock. This access, through invention, to what memory doesn't possess is the brutal power of the novel, which by almost always disregarding the real provides the truth. And the truth is my father wasn't home.

This is explanation on a glacier, a backup of ice moving a family inch by inch. Family porn. I know that need to hedge with explanation, to immerse and re-emerge, to use the novel as a thinking machine, as Bajani says. I'm particular, we all are, about the tune the machine plays, how excruciated and for how long.

He is closer in than Sara Baume, is all I can say.