poetry this summer

Since soundeye in July I have read poetry as the start of the working day, that is, five o'clock in the afternoon onwards listening to Don Giovanni or Schubert. Mairead Byrne, Randolph Healy, Fergal Gaynor. Later Peter Manson came by post. We are Mallarmé confederates.

I remembered Anne Carson's Plainwater which I first read in the pink room upstairs at the Beckett Atelier looking over the Seine, drinking choco tea and writing my diary at length. 

Then Lena Tsykynovska came to stay in the cabin, from Odessa via Boston and Chicago. She was sure there must be a poetry bookshop in Dublin if not in Cork. I gave her a cucumber in the greenhouse and she bit the end off straightaway like a character in Tchekov.

Si la beauté n'était la mort was one of my favourite Mallarmé lines.

I told Lena about the old man who lived up at the reservoir and didn't know if it was beautiful or not. Many people are uneasy with beauty, I said. 

One way or another I have been driving through beauty and her acolytes this summer. I have caught my breath and run on as best I can through differing fracture and dispersal. This selection of the day and night. Your concerns, your reading, your innerness, your onwardness, your trepidation, loss, your breakfast.

The face of Mallarmé on the cover of the September 22nd New Yorker is calm, thoughtful, wrapped and ribboned. M. Kalman finds a thinner younger Mallarmé than the plaid suggests. Halfway to Proust perhaps. 

CONTES CRUELS

On my former teaching shelves, I found a battered french book with no back and a detached front cover, frayed & browning pages, soft as an animal. The plays of Corneille. I'll never read that again. I threw it in the stove basket and, a day or two later, thought I'd put it in the fire, looked at the opening pages, it wasn't Corneille at all, it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, friend of Mallarmé, his NOUVEAUX CONTES CRUELS et PROPOS D'AU DELA, and a few fragments inédits. Soft chalky pages are seductive. French publishing a hundred years ago followed the aesthete, the effete, as now the pronoun sensitive. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam — I don't know what his friends called him — was a creature of his own decline. La vieille France, la France profonde, has a network, a spider's web, of decaying aristocracy, and he was one such, working his way out of reality as much as he could. Vivre, les serviteurs le feront pour nous.  

Sara said the other night that she liked to pack an adventure bag when she was young, which would have included a pair of binoculars and a book with soft pages she took from her grandmother's shelves. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam would garnish an adventure bag, no trouble. You could stop and read it under an apple tree somewhere.

Cynthia Ozick, Two

Such a good time with Cynthia Ozick the other week, I thought I'd continue: The Messiah of Stockholm and Foreign Bodies. Sometimes you shouldn't continue. Sometimes you should veer off left and land wherever. La chair est triste hélas et j'ai lu tous les livres. Said Mallarmé. 

Cynthia Ozick is aware of being a parasite, of living off literature, off reading. She prompts a sense of my own history with books; alternating between pleasure at finding kin, and dismay at the reflection offered, the rabbit-hole of learning. What to do with all this language, this history. Cynthia Ozick comes back to her origins on little prompting. Rapidly you're there with the shifting population of central europeans in the early and mid-twentieth century, the shuffle of feet mostly westward, the resting places offered and then withdrawn. Ever onward. Permanent negotiation with the powers that be. 

She photographs with the clever schoolgirl to the fore. Even in old age. 

Much as I like her she makes me want to stop reading and walk out into the evening.

Robert Pogue Harrison, Maurice Blanchot.

In praise of sketchy reading

I read a review by Robert Pogue Harrison of a book about Maurice Blanchot; which sent me back to L'Espace Littéraire, bought in 1968, first read in Paris and annotated in pencil (some unknown other reader since added a few marks in pen). I can hardly make out the annotations, which have merged with the yellowing of the pages, but I only need to read a few sentences to reach straight back to that annotating self for whom reading was visceral, essential, vertical, vertiginous, unending—and in french.

 L'oeuvre attire celui qui s'y consacre vers le point où elle est l'épreuve de l'impossibilité. Expérience qui est proprement nocturne, qui est celle même de la nuit. ... profondeur silencieuse qui la garantit comme son sens. ... Mais quand tout a disparu dans la nuit, "tout a disparu" apparaît. C'est l'autre nuit. La nuit est apparition du "tout a disparu". Elle est ce qui est pressenti quand les rêves remplacent le sommeil.

This is where my aged edition — nrf idées — fell open.

Have a look at the opening essay, 'La Solitude Essentielle'. Rilke is there, welcoming himself into solitude. Then Mallarmé. Then Kafka. And me. In a flat in Montmartre under the volcano, the revolution, reading and reinventing my paquet de merveilles. José Corti in his bookshop by the Luxembourg gardens, had sent me back to Montmartre with Albert Béguin and Maurice Blanchot. I was already reading Rimbaud, and Nerval. The flat next door to mine, had a K on the door. The flat was empty.

I also read that year Le Livre à Venir and L'Entretien Infini. And Blanchot's novel, Thomas l'Obscur. Postmodern cousin of Jude The Obscure. Stretching into 'The Nothing Beyond Nothing'. Robert Pogue Harrison's title. And where we came in.

Berg, Ann Quin

Berg by Ann Quin. Brighton in the sixties, where I spent nine formative years. Any Brighton I read or see on film has to settle beside those nine years, five in the town, the last four out in the country. Ann Quin was fermenting her own death while I was vanishing into Mallarmé a few miles outside Lewes. She walked into the sea. I went to Ireland.

I read Berg in the last few days with a kind of nervous reserve, trying not to recognise more than I had to. I don't know why she had to have Berg a man, a son who might kill his father, when she was a woman, a daughter, who wanted to kill herself. Evasive behaviour from the nineteen sixties. We were all drilled into freedom but it didn't feel like that. We were not saying what we meant.

Ann Quin walked into the sea, salt and buoyant. Virginia Woolf walked into the Ouse not far away, with stones in her pockets.

The remembered mother, the implacable sea, says the back cover blurb of Berg, a Calder book, 1964, in thick chalky paper. Berg has a large author photo on the front cover, and 50p written in biro between title and author. Judy Kravis, 1975, written on the pre-title page.

Gucci, Mallarmé, New Yorker

Read of the week was a Gucci ad on the back of the New Yorker. Straight to the point. In french.

Droit au but, les revers voient grand.  

The point is out of sight, beyond a pair of wide, white lapels on black silk and wool. Mallarmé would write like this in 2019.

Vous ne risquer pas de manquer votre entrée en optant pour cette veste de smoking croisée noire 

en cady de soie et laine.

Mallarmé wrote and produced a fashion magazine called La Dernière Mode at the end of the nineteenth century, a poet on sabbatical among women's clothes, compiling his sentient dictionary, his gamut of suggestion.

Et l'on n'est pas au bout de ses surprises, puisque 

l'ensemble se complète d'un casque en feutre noir à visière jaune transparente

The less you understand the more

The better the entrance you make

Say nothing and you fascinate

By the reach of your lapels

You are transparent and 

Still you have secrets

Perfect

Your visor tinted

Spastic in stance

You strike a pose

Of antic Egyptian

You play your role

As you understand it

As we understand you

To understand it in this costume

Jouez votre rôle comme vous l'entendez

Jósef Czapski, Proust

It's rare to read a book whose context is as powerful as its content. Lost Time was written as a series of lectures on Proust given by Józef Czapski when he was a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp. After a day's labour in freezing temperatures, prisoners hung onto their sanity by preparing talks on topics close to their hearts. Czapski retrieved A la recherché du temps perdu out of greatest need in the most gruelling circumstances. The prisoner's vigilance sharpens the mind and the memory, the need for relief.

A book once read and re-read, a book beloved, becomes embedded in the mind and cannot be erased. In Fahrenheit 451, books are walking around in remembered state in the half-light, their readers freed from the confines of a police state. Czapski is rescued from his ordeal by putting together, without reference to the book, which of course he didn't have, his recollections of Proust. A rememberer remembered at minus 45 degrees.

I taught Proust for many years, mostly the first two volumes. What would I be able to put together in dire circumstances, in dire need? Erich Auerbach in 1936 in Istanbul, also without books or periodicals, wrote Mimesis, which I read as a student, more impressed by the circumstances of the writing than by the book itself.

Questions and answers about the impression that reading lays down, imperceptible until revived, like the Proustian involuntary memory, in the mind of the reader. All the books I've read, some more startlingly than others, have furnished the privacy of my mind in different ways. I'd remember them in direst need. None perhaps more so than Proust, and I'd have to add Virginia Woolf, and the Four Quartets, and Sebald, and Mallarmé, and many more, in that boundless way that lists have.

Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier

Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier, written when she was 23, calls up my diary's desert years, in my early twenties, which you can't so much read as taste and then pause. No crevice left unexplored, unsaid. Clarice had a firmer grasp on the stuff of her life than I did. She pulls back from the brink of what can't be said, and then says it.

That's when things became real. Who'd forced her to speak, who: she could cry scared and tired in that instant because if there were a strange phrase to say it would be: please pass me the olives.

She is persistent; you can choose any sentence in The Chandelier and there it is.

He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence.

She has the muscularity of what she looks at. She is resolute. She uses many verbs. I avoided verbs, unless in the subjunctive mood. I liked (abstract) nouns. I was deflected, diluted and hung out to dry in the groves of academe. I was reading Mallarmé and trying to comprehend my solitude and its diary.

and to tell me not to speak
would be to tell me that
all I ever said was but
a crevice long in the wood
in the frame of a picture
I thought was not mine alone.

With Clarice there's a push to make clear the connect/disconnect of the outer to the inner world. Here is every last thought and observation, every conjecture.

Reality was laughing at all of them. She was arranging the flowers with all her fingers. Her barely-present lips were hiding in shadows born from the position of her head.. Her breasts were growing congested squeezed by her clothes, her hips were widening with fatigue, without beauty.

Tuesday 9th June 1970, JK's diary takes a rueful look at itself.

It will perhaps be the one triumph of this diary to have written itself both in and out of existence. 

On the 17th of July 1970 I recorded the bus conductor's conversation with one of his passengers. How he was going to Jersey this year with the wife, £42, cottage of course, including the fare, and that's £18, so it's not bad. Other people's reality butted in verbatim with a certitude I could only keep in reserve. Other people's lives. Clear as fiction.

Clarice, bless her, is always in existence, batting about among her certitudes, wrangling her definitions.

Stubborn, she was staring at her face trying to define its fleeting magic, the softness of the movement of breathing that was lighting it and slowly putting it out. The corruption was bathing her in a sweet light. So there she was. So there she was. There was no one who could save or lose her. And that's how the moments were unfurling and dying while her quiet and mute face was floating in expectation. So there she was. Even yesterday the pleasure of laughing had made her laugh. And ahead of her stretched the entire future. 

You can pick any few pages, any few lines, and there she is, seeking herself out, losing and then seeking, saying it all: the truth was so fast you had to squint to see it. In the diary of JK age 23, the truth was so submerged you had to drown to find it.

And the more dire the dead end, the long sheet of failure, gales that are perplexity incarnate.

The Chandelier and JK's diary are alike intense, best tasted in essence, like lavender, then left to rest. These two young women are scrupulous and relentless, JK all metaphor and remove, Clarice all tongue and fire, both strung out on the effort, torture, pleasure, of trying to clarify.

The name of Mallarmé sprang from The New Yorker today and in I went. This is prepared ground. I spent four or five years with Mallarmé in my twenties, working on a PhD, the most comfortable/uncomfortable fit of my young life. 'After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in a fine mist, and terror sets in,' writes Alex Ross. To me it wasn't terror, unless the terror that underlies ecstasy. Most other reading after that was akin to a long hot bath or an afternoon in the sun. My immersion in Mallarmé prepared me in an absolute way for the long business of not understanding. Any correlation between words and life was silently shattered. I was more at home among words that were, you could say, talking among themselves, than among people. I could move among words as among trees or clouds. Especially French words, with their greater, plausible, unknowability. For a number of years I wrote my diary in Mallarméan encryption from which I only emerged by going to live in another country and becoming a teacher. For years after my thesis, and the book I made from it, the name of Mallarmé was unbearable. What kind of creature could read Mallarmé with such fellow feeling? Become Mallarmé when left to herself? I didn't wait around to hear the answer.

‘Busy Timmy puts on his outdoor shoes’ is the first sentence I ever read. Aged three or four, I absorbed the picture of Timmy in his blue trousers, his lace-up shoes half on, his eyes already distracted by the sandpit in which he would play. Over and over again I read the sentence next to the picture and felt the new reader’s awe and pleasure: these letters, that boy, his outdoor shoes, the sandpit and all that led to.

In the second reading age, which lasts twenty or thirty years, books are limitless, you don’t reread unless you have to, for study, or, later, for teaching; there are even several writers you’re saving for later.

‘People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading,’ said Logan Pearsall Smith. Age thirteen or fourteen, engaged in books at a rate of one a day from the local library, I would have agreed. As I worked my way through fiction A to Z, I could sense the day I’d need a bigger library, or the desire to reread.

The third reading age is Mallarmé’s: la chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres. ‘The flesh is sad, alas, and you’ve read everything’. The writers you were saving for later still do not draw you. Faulkner, for example. Book choice is more freighted, more difficult. The third reading age is the age of rereading.

When I first read Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges in my early twenties, synapses were popping by the end of the first page. I had no idea where these stories took me but I didn’t want to leave. I read them slowly, with a long pause between each, like a child with a favourite dessert, delaying the last mouthful. When I got to the end of the last story, I started reading it again. I didn’t understand it any better, but we were on a different footing now: Borges had taken up residence in my head, I didn’t need to understand it any more than I needed to understand a walk through the woods.

After that, every year or two I reread Borges, and The Waves and The Shrimp and the Anemone, William books when I was ill, or PG Wodehouse.  A hundred years of solitude had me for at least a decade. I read it twice in succession while staying in an architect’s house in the Berkshires which offered no other reading books. Every ten years I read Proust again. Moby Dick now and then. Robinson Crusoe (most memorably, on holiday, lying on my bed, I read only the righthand pages). More recently I’ve reread Sándor Márai, Roberto Bolaño, James Salter, Grace Paley, WG Sebald, some of them many times. It’s good to know what it’s time for, in the mental landscape. Most writers say they avoid reading books that might influence them. I seek them out. 

I read Roger Deakin’s Wildwood for the first time before Christmas. Although it looked like the kind of book I would ideally like to read outdoors, in summer, I began, and almost immediately it felt like a book by someone I knew, or could have known, wished I had known (he died a few years ago). In a practical, democratic, reassuring sweep, he moves through land, trees and the people whose lives are engaged with them. The chapters about apple and walnut trees in central Asia were the best: Central Asia is my idea of the middle of the world. The capital of Khazakhstan, Almaty, means, Where the apples are. In my mental topography, the centre of the world should be an orchard, a hill, and hives of bees, a river running through it, meadows. And it is.

When I was seven I was given Fairy Tales from the Balkans. My favourite story was The Tzarevna Loveliness Inexhaustible, in which a sleeping princess/warrior/recluse guards the flask of living water. One sip, and you’d live for ever. My favourite part was where the Tsarevna, weary of war, weary of the highway, disports herself with her maidens in sunlit meadows, eating fruit, nuts and honey before going home for a very long sleep. All this took place beyond the lands of thrice nine, in the empire of thrice ten, far away to the north-east, across the Great Marsh, over the mountains and through the forest untouched by human hand since the beginning. Khazakhstan, Uzbekhistan and Kyrghyzstan, as I now understand. Roger Deakin witnessed what I imagined from the age of seven, what I’ve attempted to create where I live. My garden is the fruitful meadow in which the Tzarevna and her maidens played. Believe that. On a good day. The apples I grow came first from there. No, second. First from further east. And then it travelled in the digestive system of the horse, westward.

How many times did I read the story of the Tzarevna Loveliness Inexhaustible? Perhaps hundreds, certainly dozens.

Roger Deakin is a rereader. One book, A Million Wild Acres, he says he has never really stopped reading. As in a way I have never stopped reading Proust. Even if I never read it again.

I read Wildwood for the second time two weeks later, in January, making my way towards the good bits, as I would with a Schubert quartet: the shape of the walnut (if it looks like a brain it must be good for the brain), the country girl in Uzbekhistan in her sloppy joe jumper, how the apple travelled west, the smell of apples in Michael Hamburger’s library. 

Let’s rewrite Mallarmé: the flesh is happy, and all the books I’ve liked best are still there to be read again.