SPENT LIGHT : A GOOD RUIN

Architect Louis Kahn said a building is only good if its ruins will be good, I read in Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Louis Kahn believed that we humans are all made of spent light— ruins of another kind. I read Lara Pawson and as I read I am not sure this is where I want to be, on this bed of anger, indignation, among the barbed domestic objects of Lara Pawson's life, which is your life, my life, the objects that populate our domesticity, make up our errant psyche. 

The thing is, I like a bit of labour. I feel complete when I get down on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor. I take real pleasure retrieving the large sponge from the cupboard beneath the sink.

I polished the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor today. I know what she means. She and I can meet on our hands and knees.

Which is to say, viscerally. In a building, empty or full.  Ideal for nighttime reading; you read in good faith, you don't know if a line or two will gel and carry you or simply you'll get tired enough to sink into your own world, which is sleep.

Sunday Lunch in Ballinhassig, cooked by Joe, who had built his house from dreamtrade, the company he built on the red tape of international trade, he'd done the Ballymaloe cookery course, bought the Cambridge Beckett Letters and started Proust. It's a great beginning, I said, 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' Actually I said that more to his daughter Lia, who is fifteen. She has no idea how going to bed early is a good beginning for anything, but she might remember later. 

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. 

NOT READING BUT FLYING

I knew as I neared the end of Inland by Gerald Murnane, that I would immediately start reading it again now I was attune to the shifting forms and spaces, multiple identities and unfulfilled histories, now I was a fully-fledged reader, I wouldn't need to keep re-reading the beginning, as I did the first time, to settle, as I thought, questions of who was where and in what language, between which rivers, with a view of what kinds of grasslands, inner and outer. This time I would not need to settle anything. As I began, I found I was turning the pages with the joy of dream-flying, Look! no hands, on a bicycle, the glorious understatement of the moment when horses no longer gallop but are said to break into a run.

The boy-man between two streams, on the grasslands, the same and different grasslands, same and different girl-woman, many names, many plants, a science everywhere if you're looking, the more you look the more enraptured and uneasy you become. Gerald Murnane, like Proust, like Virginia Woolf, makes you inhabit your own thoughts in the guise of his. The hungarian puszta, the faux american prairie, the grasslands of Melbourne County, the grasslands beyond where you live, between two creeks that flow down the map but never join up. People live between them and are fashioned by them, they have been ousted and must resettle between another pair of creeks, the same and different. As every person is many people, every name many names, every word many words, every grassland multiple within and without. There is another world but it is inside this one. Gerald Murnane kneads this Eluard line across several pages, stays with it, plays with it in the middle of the book, and we, his readers, often invoked, stay and play too. The room in which we read splits slightly for a moment to show what's inside.

When we were driving around Australia I wrote down the name of every creek we crossed. When I drove round North America in 1980-1, south from New York, west from New Orleans, north from L.A,  east from northern California, I noted all those You Are Now Entering boards at the edge of towns with name, elevation and population. Entering Ideal, South Dakota, elevation 12, Population 57. 

Stream of sentences: Gerald Murnane

In his introduction to the second edition of Tamarisk Row, Gerald Murnane sets to rights those readers who told him that the chapter 'The Gold Cup is run' is stream of consciousness. It is no such thing, he says.

What is now the last section of the book consists of five very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, together with a description of part of a horse race.

He writes as a clockmaker, says J.M. Coetzee, a mapmaker, himself; he gives himself up to fiction. 

If you read Gerald Murnane at the right moment, his exactitude becomes dreamlike. There he is, giving himself up to a fiction of 1940s small town Australia, a boy age eight or ten, preoccupied by horse racing, racecourses, jockey colours, marbles, seeing up girls' pants behind tamarisk trees. 

The last time I read Gerald Murnane I was impatient with it. This time, more exténuée, I can keep restarting the race and the betting, Feel the flux of staying in one place. The depth charge. The adult writer reading and re-reading Proust.  

Proustian Australia is poignant. The broken pavé is a milkstone. Discuss. 

Ruskin, Proust, Veronese

Up at the reservoir, trying to read Ruskin in the shadow of the equinox, wind picking up, gravel pit works grinding away on the other side, followed by a swim, ultimate or penultimate, who knows, then home. The next Ruskin essay, in the evening, is an inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, 

Sight. Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps, on the whole, the most important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. .... To be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

Ruskin, earnest Victorian, two firm syllables however you say it. Proust read Ruskin. His Venice was created by reading Ruskin, so that when eventually he went to Venice he was disappointed: this was not Venice at all. He would have been better off staying at home and sending postcards, as Flann O'Brien recommends.

Reading Ruskin makes me think of whoever I know who who has read Ruskin, or might, who lives by a certain way of questioning or wrestling, enjoys the rhythm of sentences, the geography of thinking, not preachy, more explicatory in the manner of a country man leaning on a gate or sitting at a hearth.

Ruskin spent six weeks in Turin studying the brocade in a Veronese painting. Can we read Ruskin as he reads brocade? For six weeks?

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower.

Women too. When are women rightly occupied? Where is the amusement of women? Whence this masculine optimism? Why can't I read without asking these questions? This is the amusement of women.

As Ruskin says, one kind of writing exists because, for various reasons, there is no one to say it to.

Kathy Acker and Italo Zvevo

Kathy Acker suits and doesn't suit overwrought lives. I read a page or two of Great Expectations for the bam bam bam, the bumpy jolty, the loud rending sound — it's less like reading and more like overhearing conversations on the train — there's a kind of consistency, messy, and you can be fascinated and then abruptly not want to read, not to hear any more, just fix a stare at the middle of Ireland, the middle of anywhere, Portugal, for example, or Italy.

At other times of the day and night I have been reading Italo Zvevo Confessions of Zeno (which has been reissued, I noticed in Dublin the other day) which isn't very confessional beside Kathy Acker, who isn't very confessional beside Proust, who isn't any more than Freud or Dear Frankie. Kathy Acker and Italo Zvevo tango past the equinox. Sometimes this is as much I can read, when I'm reading the hill I live on day and night too.

Stuart Holland, Henry James, Colm Toibin

I wonder if Stuart Holland, political economist, who said to me circa 1972 that people like him worked in his way, among policy and debate, so that people like me could work in our way, among poetry and — he could not complete my sentences as I could not complete his.

Men who work the world not the land, who wield analysis and field opinion, do not know what to make of women who escape their grasp into a row of beans.

I have often remembered Stuart working for a world in which poetry could have an undisturbed, accepted place. I have thought of him and others I half-knew then who were working for a better world, I thought, with only such recognition or adulation as was due. One mutual friend said that Stuart was drawn up short by my, what was it, my immunity to his importance.

I was more egalitarian or innocent than he was; what I read as timidity, he read as strength. We're always at half-mast to our understanding of ourselves or of others.

I have continued reading Henry James this week, under the protective memory of Stuart Holland, who now divides his time, I learn, between Portugal, Hungary, and possibly Italy. I have read several novellas, one of whose principal characters, usually young, is dead at the end. I have thought about the relation of reading Henry James to streaming Netflix and watching the news. Henry James is one of those writers who demands to be situated, as if, out of a distinguished thinking family bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he, like Stuart Holland, must be in relation to his times.

Now I'm reading Washington Square, which is more like a play, more like the art of (domestic) war and thus surely cousin to Netflix if not the news in any era. People who don't like Henry James like Washington Square, apparently, as people who don't like opera like Mozart opera, while Henry himself didn't choose to include it in his collection of tales. Too simple perhaps, too relaxing a tale of misogyny and polite exploitation, not enough clauses. Reading Henry James is like flexing your clause muscles; Washington Square, for some, including Henry himself, is not enough of a workout.

I have never read Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James. I would rather read Henry James than a novel about Henry James. Though I did like Czapski's account of Proust as remembered from a prison camp as a means of mental and spiritual survival.

Much of my reading, be it Henry James or a New Yorker story in a hot bath, is pointillist in manner: dot and space and shy image as images show through as in memory, with loose, absorbent edges.

Edward Abbey, Thoreau

American Indians have no word for wilderness because wilderness was their home, Edward Abbey, always a rambunctious read, tells us. Prompted equally by the preoccupations of an activist moment in my life, and by Józef Czapski's lectures on Proust, written without Proust's text, I remembered the Edward Abbey Reader bought in the 80s, and turned to the piece about going down the Green River in Utah with five friends and a ghost: Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden.

'Thoreau's mind has been haunting mine for most of my life', he says at the beginning of the river journey, but this is the first time in thirty years he has read Walden. It may also be thirty years since I read it. I went to Walden Pond on my trip around North America in 1980/81, at about the same time Edward Abbey was descending the Green River. That makes me, I feel, a privileged reader, even a companion of my own reading. Walden Pond was tame in 1981. The banks were well-trodden black earth, like the earth of the town where I grew up.

(Thoreau) lived in a relatively spacious America of only 24 million people, of whom one sixth were slaves. A mere 140 years later we have grown to a population ten times larger, and we are nearly all slaves. ... We are, most of us, dependent and helpless employees.
        What would Henry have said? He said, "In wildness is the preservation of the world ...  I go to my solitary woodland walks as the homesick to their homes".

As Edward Abbey and his friends float and row and paddle downriver, past Woodruff, Point and Saddlehorse bottoms, past upheaval Bottom and Hardscrabble Bottom, Thoreau accompanies. It's a fruitful companionship. When you're away you remember your life companions and their vividness grounds you. As you move downriver, you also stay put. Thoreau was rarely away. He wasn't a traveller.

Instead he made a world out of Walden Pond, Concord, and their environs. He walked, he explored, every day and many nights, he learned to know his world as few ever know any world.

As I call on neighbours here, I wonder what is the world they know, the world they explore, if exploration is the right word?

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.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

'I am nourishing a creature' wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, who nourished in her turn another, nameless, unnamed, unnameable creature, male, larger than life, like Byron silhouetted against mountain peaks, but vulnerable.

What do any do but digest as best they can? Mary Shelley had a mother, a father, a husband and a poet silhouetted against mountain peaks to digest through her own pregnancy and birth into Frankenstein and his monster.

The looming man, vessel of my early adolescent dreams. I dreamed him behind me and I couldn't move, in the lane out the back beside the Baptist Church.

For two hundred years the vessel of the monster fills, empties, refills with our terrors, our mothers, our fathers, our gullies, our peaks, our disguises. Jill Lepore in The New Yorker made me re-read Frankenstein then wonder if I'd ever read it at all, if you could be whacked the same way twice. It could have been one of those books you absorb without reading, like Moby Dick or Proust.

But the politics of "Frankenstein" are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

 What does the baby sound like? Is he crying? Yes.

The reader makes free with Frankenstein and his monster, digests as s/he will, confounding Frankenstein and his monster, fear with adventure, love with loss, innocence with corruption. In common with our collage/assemblage habit two hundred years on, Mary Shelley pulls in all she knows from her innermost doll to her father's and her husband's and his friends' science, gothic and romance. This is who she is at the time she is writing, which is also the time when she is producing creatures herself, who die, and cry. 'Awake and find no baby', she wrote in her diary.

For the first theatrical production of "Frankenstein," staged in London in 1823, (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as "–––––".

Jack Robinson, An Overcoat

Some books challenge the sequence and linearity of reading. A narrative is there but skewed deep in itself, knocking about time zones, at the bottomlessness of a reader/writer's reactions. Jack Robinson's (Charles Boyle's) An Overcoat, a transposition of Henri Beyle's (Stendhal's) 19th century love life into the 21st century, has footnotes that spawn footnotes, references that spawn references, sometimes onto the next page, so that the reader reads Beyle (Boyle) across a couple of centuries and several page levels, with Robinson keeping his feet dry on the title page.

When I was studying latin at school our humorous and whimsical teacher encouraged us to interleave our set texts with blank pages, so that Virgil's Georgics and Horace's Odes in their staid bindings multiplied into comments, reminders and associations. When we gave the books back at the end of the year we took out our carefully glued in sheets of paper so that next year's students could insert and write their own.

Proust, in like manner, presented with proofs of A la recherché du temps perdu, sat up in bed near the end of his life and interleaved additional text then interleaved the interleavings, only death putting a stop to an endless process.

You can of course ignore the footnotes in An Overcoat. You can reduce the number of hidden pockets and whizz along more rapidly; Beyle/Boyle will be there in his essence. The footnotes, though, ranging around Stendhal and his commentators as well as Boyle/Beyle's scenes from everyday life, open up the book, let you lose your way as is proper in this 21st century. Keep your weakness intact, as Henri Michaux says, don't try to acquire strengths.

William Saroyan, Rock Wagram,

My copy of William Saroyan's Rock Wagram (1952), has, in addition to a sweet musty smell, a dedication and a date in code on the flyleaf, and the price, 16/=, mostly erased, and then, maybe half a century later, £1.00, written in large sloppy pencil. The code looks mathematical, with a lot of dashes between symbols. You can sense an intimacy, a friendship, between two men, I'd think. Good to remember that the gift of a book communicates before you've read a word.

Not a great novel, but if you like William Saroyan's stories, spend time in his company, as well as in the company of the two men whose friendship was in code. As Proust said somewhere, all great literature is in code; or did he say all great literature is a foreign language, which is maybe the same thing? All ordinary literature also, all ordinary life.

Actually, when I pulled the Saroyan off the shelves, I meant to look at William Sansom, who was adjacent, reminded of something he wrote about moving a table out into a garden in order to write, and how I didn't need a table, just somewhere flat with a backrest and preferably sun. The William Sansom book, a Penguin with the price, second-hand, 3P, slathered across the front cover in black felt-tip, was also published in 1952.