Affinities, Brian Dillon

If I had gone the way of writing thinking books instead of poetic/creative books, I'd write like Brian Dillon in Affinities — and most of his other books — informed by the same impulses, not critical but digressive, sympathetic, reaching for those images and words that have impinged on him and fed him, many of which, especially the words, have also fed me: William H. Gass, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum. 

I start to compile my own book of affinities. Jean-Pierre Richard on Baudelaire's taste, for example. Virginia Woolf. Certain humans, bereft somewhere, bring certain sensations, phenomena, to bear on their creative lives, and are at least momentarily replete. There would be more music, more landscape, in my list.

On holiday in Portugal, as I read Brian Dillon, on this or that bed or beach, P. read The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abrams, which I glanced at, read a sentence or two, and felt that people like him, like David Abrams, academics and professional intellectuals, create a professional distance.  

Brian Dillon inhabits what he is writing about. There is no problem. Images and words compose him: affinities are what he's made of, instances of himself-in-others that he can recognise.  

There are ten short essays on affinity, in among pieces on writers, photographers, and the more personal affinities, not all of them understood with gratitude. Eccentric aunts. Family in general. Wayne Koestenbaum's 'ruinous attachment to the opening theme of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15.'

This affinity, says Koestenbaum, is a kind of crush, and like a crush it tends to mark one out for the moment as faintly mad. The one who feels an affinity embraces knowingly, eagerly, his or her own madness and stupidity, idiocy. Affinity exiles us from consensus, from community.

Like Brian Dillon, I write for as long as the mood is on me, stop when it shifts or vanishes. No sense of a structure or a goal, or even that I've said all there is to say. Impossible, she says. Like the streets of Olhão, wriggling behind the waterfront, now crumbling, now wedding-cake, there is only an end when you give up looking for one.

'I'll side with what I can't understand'

John Nankivell, William Gass

Side Elevation of the Deanery, Ardagh, County Longford, drawn by John Nankivell.

A flyer from the Irish Georgian Society is on my desk.

I read William H. Gass's Omensetter's Luck prone before the stove, this lowering afternoon, and when I say read, and prone, that is what it was, the long, exact, Gass moment, and I couldn't say, à la fin, nor would I want to say, what kind of luck Omensetter had at all, or Gass, for that matter, having to write like this, relentless unto madness sometimes, the old push/pull of language going back to magma.

William H, Gass, Bill Gass

William H. Gass, Bill Gass, in a Revised & Expanded Preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & other stories, is looking for a reader.

Even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor or with love, where is that sensitive, admiring, other pair of ears?  . . .  I am fashioning a reader for these fictions . . . of what kind, you ask? well, skilled and generous with attention, for one thing, patient with longueurs, forgiving of every error and the author's self-indulgence, avid for details . . . ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines.

I circle around his pages, pleased to be there, as you could circle a copse of trees and go home, go to sleep, all in a day's work. The calque or layer upon layer of reading every so many years, the re-forming of an image you will forget, amalgamates into a reading yet to come.

The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need.

William H., or Bill, is clear about the difficult and the free, subtle about the obvious.

... though time may appear to pass within a story, the story itself must seem to have leaked like a blot from a single shake of the pen.

Reading the stories In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is one thing. Reading the preface is suddenly closer to the source and instead of being teased and pleased, you're moved.

Unlike this preface, then, which pretends to the presence of your eye, these stories emerged from my blank insides to die in another darkness. I willed their existence , but I don't know why. Except that in some dim way I wanted, myself, to have a soul, a special speech, a style. I wanted to feel responsible where I could bear to be responsible, and to make a sheet of steel from a flimsy page—

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;

Middle C by William Gass, Tenerife, La Gomera

I began Middle C by William Gass on the plane, at thirty-eight thousand feet.

... it repented Jehovah that he had made man... 

I continued on a rooftop in Garachico on the north coast of Teneriffa, under the volcano. Lava flow & sea vapours, backlit yuccas and birdsong, the least murmur of human life. Church bell somewhere short of twelve. I was ready to embrace uncertainty in that back and forth, jewish/not jewish way. The part of jewishness that is also not jewishness, as part of identity is having none. Wrestling with William Gass wrestling with how to phrase the human race.

The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.

I read William Gass with the greatest pleasure in the sun, his shifts and his emphases, his tries and retries, fitted my disponibilité. This is someone I know.

First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might not.

He had a feeling of great relief before he wondered what he might do with his wayward thoughts if he had no sentence to focus on.

And then the music.

Olive Fremstad and her sound—Calvé's, Caruso's sound—sounds—hollow, odd, remote,—that created a past from which ghosts could not only speak to admonish and astound, they could sing again almost as they once sang, sang as singing would never be heard sung again, songs and a singing from somewhere outside the earth where not an outstretched arm, not a single finger, could reach or beckon, request or threaten or connive.

Anywhere this would stop me in my tracks; in the sun on a rooftop in Garachico, it was glorious.

Later, on a beach in La Gomera, putting Middle C down after a few chapters, it seemed possible that all reading, as well as all hopes and fears and curiosity, could come together between two covers. Then I closed my eyes.

In an interview in The Paris Review William H. Gass says he changed his handwriting, letter by letter through the alphabet, when he was twenty, to set himself at a remove, to start again. I smile in recognition. He would get asked to write wedding invitations in his new ceremonial hand, he says. I smile again. I changed my writing, likewise, with intent, at fourteen not long after I started keeping a diary: new writing, new self, deep gulfs on every side, reliable defences. I did wedding invitations too, in my ceremonial hand, with a certain artificial elegance, so much like strands of barbed wire, as William Gass says.

Descartes, examining a piece of beeswax fresh from the hive, brought it near a flame and observed all of its sensible qualities change. He wondered why he should believe that wax remained. Couldn't he give that puddle in his hand another name?

I used to read Fiction and the Figures of Life to students; this flexibility as writer, as philosopher, as respondent to the immediate world, put me on my home ground as a teacher, rescued me from academe while covering my back. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife was another early purchase: I liked the fonts and the playfulness, the search for a way to say; I liked less the tits and ass. I chose William Gass off displays in St Marks Bookstore et al in the 1970s and early 80s. In the heart of the heart of the country. On being blue. The world within the word. Whatever it is that makes you pick up this book or that. A few lines about beeswax. The playfulness, the ambiguity, the overreach, the pendulum experiencing a rush and then settling: tock tick, tick tock.

eyes, his new book, finds me ready and up to date with William H. Gass though I haven't read him for years. The novella called In Camera, the first piece in eyes, is home turf. Two isolated people and a shop full of old photographs that may have been stolen. What further twist or sideways move can we manage? How far can we extend—our remit—our patois—ourselves? What is going on here? There's no saying. You get to the end of the story and then what you see around you is the the outside world upside down, as it should be, coming in, as you have never seen it (because you haven't been outside), as it is. All your photographs have been taken away but you are living in a pinhole camera.