ACTS OF THE BODY

In the nineteen seventies a number of long novels written about twenty years before were reissued, including the works of Patrick White in Australia, John Cowper Powys in Wales, and Thomas Wolfe in America, all of them works that slowly emerge from what feels like the long, nearly cosmic or mythic breath of a place. None of them, since then, has shown through in my walks along the bookshelves as a potential reread, until this long indoor period with very little coming into my reading life through the post or any other way, which led to my going back to Patrick White. As with other rereading lately, unleavened by work outdoors, I am easily irritated, less by the telling than by the reader I was in the nineteen seventies, and possibly the writer I was then, too. Though an ancient doggedness prevails and, after The Aunt's Story I read The Tree of Man, grateful for anything that goes on this long, with a slow sense of ageing and inevitability, great evidence of people's bodies, as if to set them forever as thin, yellowing, travelling, possibly mad aunt, or thickening, solidifying worthy farmer of few words, and his worthy wife, doubtful children, their places in what had been a wilderness and gradually became a town, with post office and motor cars. 

What then was wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. This is my life, he would have said if he had expressed himself other than by acts of the body.

The other day D said she didn't like novels because she didn't like feeling the presence of the author. She thought it always sounded pompous. It wasn't the moment for discussion but I would like to some time. Is it pompous to create characters who cannot express themselves, for whom the sudden discovery of a dragonfly on a mulberry leaf has to stand in place of all that they might say, if they could, about their lives together? The Tree of Man is nearly five hundred pages long. And most of the characters decide, where possible, to say nothing.

 

Gerald Murnane, William H. Gass

I began to get a heavy chilly feeling about a quarter of the way into Gerald Murnane's Tamarisk Row, and by the halfway point it was so bad I couldn't face these sentences: long, intricate, desolate, freezing at the height of summer.

This first novel from 1940s Australia is about horse-racing and boyhood, about racing marbles in the dust in place of horses, about a boy's preoccupation with catching a glimpse of girls' pants.

I read a lot of Patrick White in the seventies and eighties, and there's a chilly plainness in his novels too, as if this were the only way a sensitive Australian man could express the country he was born into, or out of.

Gerald Murnane writes sentences as vast and inhospitable as the land itself. The reining in of bleakness into sentences produces more bleakness.

J.M. Coetzee, who writes a puff on the back cover, is another chilly writer. Though I liked Foe, his reinvention of Daniel Defoe.

Just as I would not choose to read a novel that was in any way about football, I am dispirited by one which is about horse-racing.

By the end of the afternoon, a chance reference to William H. Gass in a review I read recently has sent me back to The Heart of the Heart of the Country.

A slow read of the long preface, lying in front of the fire on a sharp and windy afternoon, marking the most charming passages with a pencil, is what I need after Gerald Murnane.

Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn't just the size of our consciousness solidified;