Flight Without End, On the Road, Young Adam

Three novels about drifting, 1920s to 1950s, by Joseph Roth, Jack Kerouac and Alexander Trocchi. 

In Flight Without End, Franz Tunda, First Lieutenant in the Austrian army, is taken prisoner by the Russians, escapes, finds himself in Siberia where he stays for three years with a Pole who counted his words like pearls. Franz has a photograph sewn into his coat of his fiancée Irene who must be waiting for  him in Vienna. Way up in Siberia they do not hear that World War 1 has ended, and later this seems enviable. Franz leaves and travels west; he finds something like a wife in Baku; further west he is taken by the Red Army, prisoner or comrade much the same by then. He visits his brother in a town on the Rhine; no warmth here, nothing heimlich or gemütlich that he can bear; he hears that Irene has married and lives in Paris. He goes to Paris. When they finally meet she does not recognise him. 'No one in the world is as superfluous as he.' 

Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam came up this week in film versions. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty career around America, extravagant in their big jalopies, loose and louche behaviours flow as fast as they can think them up. Their freedom looks indulgent, restless, self-congratulatory. Proust, whose Swann's Way is often in the foreground of indoor scenes, looks indulgent too. 

Drifter Joe, in Young Adam, working the barges out of Glasgow, working all the women he meets, is determinedly indifferent, cold; drifting is the point of drifting. He watches his girlfriend drown in only her petticoat, knowing she couldn't swim. She is pregnant, of course. He dodges that and quits the country. In the next book he'll fetch up in New York on heroin. 

Franz Tunda is not able for the society to which he returns. He prefers Siberia and the companionship of the Siberian Pole, who'd come as a convict and settled of his own free will. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty see no society except their own. They haven't come back from a war. Young Adam is a nihilist; the only way is onwards and downwards. Joseph Roth's nineteen twenties is a richer, sadder landscape. Or so I find. According, maybe, to the principle that influential inner landscapes come from a generation earlier, not one's own. 

PLAGIARISM: the further reaches

I read Kathy Acker and think of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which I loved in 1978. Reading a few pages brings back all the unsayable,  all the oversaid of that era. Pain can be cloying. These days I am brought to a halt on page 26 by an embedded line of Rilke. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And read no more. In reading Elizabeth Smart I am reading Rilke, Rimbaud, and the Old Testament, to name a few.

Kathy Acker was born a few months after I was. The last section of Tarantula is 'The Story of My Life', September 1973.

1947. I'm born April 18th; my family thinks of itself as aristocratic, though it isn't, since my grandmother (mother's mother) came from Alsace-Lorraine to U.S.A. poor and in her later life married a wealthy man. They properly worship money as do all good Americans. They assure me that only the unworthy work. I will never have to work since I'm rich and will marry rich, that if I ever have to think about money it's because I've come down in the world. They're incredibly stingy with me. These conflicting early trainings make me proud and shy, confident that I'm by nature above other people and aware that everyone, especially my parents, hates me. .... As a baby I spit at whoever I feel like ....

As a writer she spits. She is thrown in prison for trying to figure out her desires. Or is that the Marquis de Sade? She has read Alexander Trocchi, Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love (and, my first cookbook, Around the World in Eighty Dishes) WB Yeats, Dickens.

This is writing through your reading. Kathy Acker has a lot more starting torque than Elizabeth Smart. A lot more hatred.

My mother wanted to make me exactly like her. I look like her; we both have large eyes, same bone structure, thick child's skin, dark brown hair, purple lips. We're fond of our bodies and wilful. From the first day I was born and hypocritically smiling, pretending I was happy, I opposed her: I set myself against her so that I should become someone else. She began outwardly to hate me when I began to menstruate. She wanted me to be nothing, like her.

Her autobiography segues into that of the Marquis de Sade. As, in earlier chapters, she copies events from other writers and in copying becomes their characters. Language creates her, not necessarily her own language. It is compelling to write down the words of others. If by reading you become the characters you're reading about, by copying other writers' words you embody them, inhabit them, and so release yourself from yourself. Which was maybe what she, like many writers, especially poets, was trying to do all along.

My first plotless experience, Cain's Book, Giovanni's Room

Unsure exactly who, among my selves, read Another Country, I'm now reading Giovanni's Room, another Corgi book with a blocky blue/red on black cover, to see if anything comes clear.

I cannot read James Baldwin novels without encountering my seventeen year-old self. That is how embedded I am in all I've ever read. Reading James Baldwin also involves reading my old diary. I cannot even look at the author photo on the back of the book without becoming the diarist I was. The diarist I am? The incomprehension and impatience of yesteryear are fresh.

Around the time I was reading James Baldwin I also read Alexander Trocchi, as recommended by a boy I fancied who worked in the market. Cain's Book was my first plotless experience; I still prefer plotless. Experiential. Another kind of page-turner.