Mehalah, Gothic Novel, (A Story of the Salt Marshes)

John Berger writes about receiving his new book from the publisher, and, finding it badly produced, burning it. High-minded perhaps — he lived in the Alps — but I understand. An ugly book is sad. I got one in the post the other day: Mehalah Gothic Novel (A Story of the Salt Marshes) by Sabine Baring-Gould. Print on demand. Confect a cover out of online prompts; cram the text into 170 pages, which would be better spread over twice that. There was a time when I read gothic novels for their otherness, their badness, their removal from the here and now. Whatever I read I like it to be for pleasure. I like a book to be a book. This is a tomb. 

However, as a child of salt marshes, read it I must. It's a way of visiting my home turf, albeit in 1880. The flatness of the Essex coast has given it in recent times a flatness of character in the popular imagination. Back then there was a rich life with dialect and contraband, as well as some of the detail I remember from my childhood, like shrimps and winkles measured by the half pint in a pewter mug, and smoked eels, but most of all the marshes and their arcane channels and the bottomless mud I feared.

The plot is rich, fecund and ridiculous. The book was a sensation when it came out. Halfway through my reading I realised the author was a man, and a vicar. Which changed everything. Mehalah, most often called Glory, was a strong, capable, beautiful gipsy type, with a failing mother, a beloved George who vanishes, and an evil landlord Elijah who keeps a mad brother locked in the cellar. The twists of plot keep you, reluctantly, reading. Everything ends badly, which is what makes it gothic rather than romantic. Mehalah marries Elijah, not George, burns out his eyes with vitriol, feels guilty and, although George reappears, vows to atone for her sin by staying with Elijah, who padlocks them together in a boat and pulls out the plug.

There is much about the fires of God, which I noticed afresh after I knew the author was vicar of Mersea Island for ten years. To me this confuses everything, but it adds fire without going so far as the fires of hell imbued into the folk of Ireland. 

running in the family

The other night I plucked a book from the shelves in the dark: Michael Ondaatje's running in the family was in my hand. A childhood in Ceylon, family as riotous as was manageable in prose, albeit poetic prose. In the poetry is the managing. Snakes run through the house. The cobra that settled on the radio was not shot because the radio was the only source of music in the house. The snakes ate the hens' eggs, so hundreds of ping pong balls were introduced in the nesting boxes, which disabled the snakes for a while. Mervyn Ondaatje, Michael's father, ended up keeping hens. As did the mother of Marguerite Duras. Last dance of a falling family. 

Michael Ondaatje found everywhere stories and people in Ceylon when he went back after twenty some years, he found roads and food, trains and verandahs. In and around Maldon, Essex, where I grew up, I found the places I went to get away from stories and people: salt marshes, old allotments, disused railways. Between the chickens and the cacti and succulent society, I came to like Mervyn Ondaatje.

He kept journals about every one of the four hundred varieties of cactus and succulents—some of which he had never seen, others of which he had smuggled into the country via a friend. Important days were those when certain water plants arrived from islands in the Pacific.

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

I stubbed my toe on the wood box in the night and so was laid up for the day, which was all wind and sugar as they used to say. I read The End of Me by Alfred Hayes end to end beside the stove and was well pleased. The limping slowed me down. After my visit to Essex I had a whole geophysical childhood to absorb. Reading someone else's tale can oil your own.

I have read two other novels by Alfred Hayes. Less novels than trajectories — I have always had trouble saying that word — poem hardly easier — and Alfred Hayes has a poetic trajectory. He makes for the end of himself with plenty ellipses so that you end at the last chapter at last light, spent as he is. 

BATS IN OCTOBER

A bat flew by outside, through the gingko and the service tree. I was thinking about Barbara Pym and then Betty Smith, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn which was my sleep inducer before I went to London and Essex, book fair and woods and marshes of origin, respectively. I left Betty Smith at home and took with me Quartet in Autumn; I was midway before I left so maybe in Stockwell and in Boreham, Essex, I could bed down in the mid-twentieth century according to Barbara Pym. Her quartet of people work in the same office, the two women retire first, the two men look on and discuss the women, who do not discuss the men, or anything, with each other: one is solo eccentric, entrenched, her garden shed full of milk bottles; the other, timid, pliant, settles onto the shifting tide. 

Back home, exhausted, full of the past, I could not think who was who in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But that doesn't matter.

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Again

Finally up at the (revised) pond in sunlight reading Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout and noting the reestablishing wildlife: ten thousand tadpoles, six whirligig beetles and a couple of water boatmen. It's hard to imagine being as involved as Elizabeth Strout and her Olive in a small town like Crosby, Maine, taking sustenance from the same, peopled place. I suppose I had that in Maldon, Essex, but did not choose to stay with it in any way.

Olive Kitteridge was a maths teacher in Crosby, Maine, and in some chapters her former pupils remember her as odd and strong; they remember her, anyway, so she appears in their lives, these chapters, among these boiling tadpoles in the first good day in six months.

Although much of the world's current nervous stasis is sympathetically quiet, I balk at the connection everyone wants to make with links & vids & photos & chat. I don't want any more from people than I did a month ago or a year ago. And such as I might want is supplied by Olive, Again.

With the advent of dry weather, Tim Chambers has spread slurry in the field below. The northeast breeze sends the smell, ammoniacal, right up through the pond. The tadpoles, I suspect, have no sense of smell.

W.G.Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

To substitute metaphor for the concept: to write, said Roland Barthes. With a substrate of Roland Barthes and Brian Dillon and unseasonably warm, still weather, I start for maybe the third time The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, his walk down the Suffolk coast, a weave of internal, external coincidence and uncertainty with a warp of historical, geographical fact set up for us to absorb in a desolate landscape: internal, external.

These contemplative, melancholic yet factual men, I can keep pace with them, then rapidly I lose what I've read. It's the cloth I'm left with, and, this evening, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Sebald's Suffolk is a landscape I know, I know the quality of the light and the relief of the desolation. This is the east coast of England, opposite Holland or Belgium. The east coast stands for lost causes. St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. I always liked that. It gave me something to start from.

Sebald, Max to his friends, incomer of a few decades, living up the road in Norfolk, has transferred his needs onto this empty coast whose moments came maybe a hundred years ago, maybe a thousand, maybe now. He is open to every association, like the small train crossing a river and how it was surplus to requirements in China a hundred years ago and fetched up in Suffolk, proving the decline of the Empire of China, and then there was the Joseph Conrad Suffolk connection and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand story, the silk industry and the urn burial—these factual men are in shadowlands, if this is what they want.

Suddenly, exhausted from a maze of August landscape and historical reference, here is Sebald ready to visit Michael Hamburger outside a village called Middleton, fellow incomer from Germany, translator, ruralist.

It's like the music of Philip Glass, just when you can't take another repetition, another league out from land, the music breaks and you're back in familiar rhythms again.

Hamburger's pile of jiffy bags by a door—you keep them and there are always more than you need—could have been Sebald's. Coincidences run wild. In rendering these people he becomes them, lapsing into the their language, their context, as his own. Down the coast there's Swinburne who visited, with other melancholics in the late nineteenth century, the lost village of Dunwich which slid into the sea. Lost cause, if ever. And Edward Fitzgerald who translated the Rubiyat of Omar Khayam from Boulge Hall in Suffolk and died of ancestral distress and failing sight. And how Sebald, Max to his friends, came upon Boulge, the Fitzgerald seat, via a Dutch man of money wishing to settle thereabouts. These are some of the threads we ride among the rings of Saturn.