UNE IMAGE PEUT-ETRE VRAIE

I like the french title une image peut-être vraie better than the english, Alex Cléo Roubaud, a portrait in fragments. The english brings out frenchness, not french, nor Alex Cléo Roubaud — her full name, her photos, her notebooks and letters — more the neutral catalogue quality that Hélène Giannechini brings to her appraisal of a short life in words and pictures, like a laying out, a door closing in great detail.

I'm well-placed to read her on a changeable afternoon in May, but I don't want to. An old unwillingness to recognise what I know best, creeps over me on the sofa in the new room, the cat asleep not far away, a few heavy showers, thunder yesterday, peppers planted out, borlotti beans started. 

A penultimate page entitled (BLACK) shows a photograph of six window panes and a cord-pull with a driveway, lawns, a belt of trees.

Let's pull the cord, hide the last photograph from view. I'll leave Alix's memory there. I wanted to write between the pieces of evidence. An account has emerged. Memories are words, and archives are documents.

       Fleshing Alix out in fiction was not my intention; I worked in the interstices between the traces of her that remain.

        This is not a photograph of Allix's life, but fragments of her work; scattered shards.

        A picture that may be true.

The Sylph Editions translation by Thea Petrou, ends with a letter to Hélène Giannechini. 

Making then, not taking. Through your wandering into the lexical fields of memory, action painting, dance, bullfighting, medicine and eroticism, I have followed Alix's processes in the darkroom and observed the imposition of her own physicality — a performance — on the film. And now I see the pictures, what they are made of.

    Thank you, Hélène.

George Craig, Sylph Editions, Beckett's Letters

A few weeks ago I googled George Craig, the teacher who fully inhabited my reading/writing life in the sixties and seventies. I found a eulogy; he had died a year before. I hadn't seen him for maybe forty years. The last time we met, at Brighton station, there was a caravan in the concourse with a banner over it: LETTERS ARE BETTER.

George and I got to know each other by letter. A piece of life in the wrong order, he said. Maybe the wrong order is the right order. Letters are indeed better. In a letter you can say, he was able to say, that he was attracted by certain directions of my mind, and thus could bypass the tutor/student form and confer on me the status of Real Person. He was in Sussex, teaching; I was in Paris, learning. I was twenty; he was thirty-six.

I read his letters over breakfast in the apartment where I was au pair. A cover page closely written on both sides, with two or three more pages on thinner paper, closely written on both sides, barely room for the signature at the bottom of the last page. The maid asked me if I was reading a novel. Of a sort, yes. A bottomless set of discriminations and refinements of approach, in the margins, between the lines, run through with apology, disclaimer and reassurance. I was not used to this kind of attention and concern.

George was diffident, circuitous, he could modify his modification of the situation till the pages grew into each other. Along with Rimbaud Blanchot Nerval Michaux et al. Along with revolution. George Craig's letters and the reading he influenced or suggested, refined almost everything that year, and for many years.  I read the letters often.

Later I went to live and teach in Ireland, where he grew up. I saw faces that reminded me of George, and of Beckett. I found his irishness, his diffidence, his apology. Our correspondence started up again, with new shifts in prolixity: subjects formerly inadmissible entered and were scrutinised. We were intimate and maybe easier on the page yet in truth no more intimate than before. Periodically I wondered what was the whole thing with George and why did it trouble me, what was this plateau on which for many years we had danced our private dance?

As well as the bundle of George's letters, tied around with thin cord in the old way, I have been reading his Sylph Cahier on Writing Beckett's Letters. After he finished teaching he spent fifteen years on the translation of letters Beckett wrote in French. Anything George wrote sounds like George. I can hear him saying it, even when he's writing; wrestling with something, call it the finer points, as students later said I was wrestling, they didn't know with what but something resonated and we all felt a surge.

Since I was twenty there have been books I read in short bursts, keeping them by me for months, dipping into a few lines to check the internal weather, unable to read more: plotless, intimate writing that plumbs depths rather than covers ground. Less like reading and more like diving into language then stopping short, having your moment and eating it in the stillness of complicity.

The heart of reading is atavistic and possessive: out of a pan of undifferentiated yearning come these words you could have written yourself. Could have but shouldn’t have needed to. Shouldn’t but did.

We read with all the reading we’ve ever done. We write through all the reading we’ve ever done. Idra Novey writes through Clarice Lispector (Sylph Editions Cahier 23). Elfriede Jelinek (Sylph Editions Cahier 18) writes through Robert Walser. Anne Carson (Sylph Editions Cahier 21) writes through Joan of Arc, Francis Bacon, Hölderlin, Paul Celan.

Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas appeared in a Brazilian newspaper in the early seventies. Where’s a newspaper now that would publish these? Actually, as I learned at the airport waiting for a delayed flight, journalists rant through jocular teeth, making the shift for their readers to the World Cup on TV, seamless.

Cronicas are short pieces arising out of the thoughts or observations of a small daily life, the sudden revelations you might have experienced before but which strike with the force of upheaval when you experience them again. Just as The Hour of the Star, her last novel, leaves narrative gasping in the gutter, the Cronicas are fully estranged from journalism.

Clarice: The Visitor by Idra Novey
The writer as visitor to the reader’s life, with all the wiles and the wherewithal to dismay and invigorate. What more can a book do? Sting and move on. Leave a residue of sisterhood, call it that, and suspense. Such a relief that you can know and not know at the same time, the condition of the other.

Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek
Robert Walser via the sensibility of Elfriede Jelinek – and the reader makes three – featherweight upheavals one after another. Crushing modesty and persistence. Constant unseating for the reader. Who is shaping whom and can we be further reduced on the page?

Nay Rather by Anne Carson
The voices of Joan of Arc had no stories and she did not know what language they spoke. What do your voices sound like? asked her inquisitors. Ask me next Saturday, she replied. Are they one or many? they asked. The light comes in the name of the voice, she said.

While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan, says Anne Carson through the Greek poet Ibykos.