READING IN A BROODY SUMMER

Most evenings I read On Foot the Velvet Odyssey in its blurred carbon copy from 1978, trying to find the ancestor of my language and internal rhythms today. And then I read the first few pages as revised onto my computer this broody summer while listening to Beethoven or Schubert in the early evening, drizzly or the only gasp of sun that day. Then I read the update of Monday Night at Home, which I wrote twenty-five years ago, and now feel the need to say again in today's patois. I don't know why all this revisiting.

This afternoon, on the sofa in the new(ish) room, I read the New Yorker summer fiction issue and dozed into its tales. Here we all are, lurching into print, or out of blurred carbon copy. On foot the velvet odyssey reads as even older than it is, an England of summer fêtes and radio shops, all set into the frame of my adolescent withdrawal. Monday Night at Home reads as more like now, or fairly recently, when my language had caught up with me and I had caught up with the world.

Sebald & Bone the Dancer

This is a Sebald summer, I'll reread everything. After The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants. One of Sebald's emigrants is Paul Bereyter, an ideal teacher, if you could have one, who brought his children on his own quest, outdoors as often as possible.The great thing about rereading books is how the complexities build, your own and the writer's, and some of them turn into music.   

... Paul told me that as a child he had once his summer holidays in Lindau, and had watched from the shore every day as the train trundled across from the mainland to the island and from the island to the mainland. The white clouds of stem in the blue air, the passengers waving from the windows, the reflection in the water — this spectacle, repeated at intervals, so absorbed him that he never once appeared on time at the dinner table all that holiday, a lapse that his aunt responded to with a shake of the head that a grew more resigned every time, and his uncle with the comment that he would end up on the railways.

Paul Bereyter ended up purposefully lying on the railway tracks, a good choice of death for a claustrophobic. Sebald is so good at partly redeemed sadness. 

Circa 1978 I wrote On Foot the Velvet Odyssey, the strange non-tale of Bone the dancer, his town, his being, and how he drew them, their voices, their footfall, all of them and their dead, into Wyse's Meadow for a grand finale. I looked at it again in 2022, and transcribed the first few pages onto the computer from a blurred carbon copy sent to a friend who kindly returned it, without comment, I think. What happened to the top copy I don't know. Then, in 2024,  Jack the dancer from Australia came here looking for earth; he brought some spare of his own, in case, and found he was already in a novel since before he was born, before his nickname was Bones or he knew about loss, or earth. He stayed in our cabin for two weeks and realised he'd been here all along. What happens in your novel, he asked. I've come ten thousand miles to find myself in a novel, I need to know. I have been looking, Jack, to see what happens. It may take some time.

Orlando, Virginia Woolf, on foot the velvet odyssey, Judy Kravis

Orlando led me, by who knows what mycelium, to the first novel I wrote, circa 1978: on foot the velvet odyssey. The only copy I could find was a carbon copy sent to a friend who politely returned it. The blurred print is appropriate to the remoteness of the writer—me—a few years out of England with an English topography and an English idiom, her hesitations and her festivities, a lively step, several removes and a lot of inward turns. This is a distinct reading experience, a novel suspension of disbelief: is/was this one of my beings, aka me, who willed her words thus? If not, who?

I'm a reader amazed. This was how I ran on then. Oh, and I ran. Lush but obscure. Mouvementé. Accidenté. Apologetic. Too many adverbs. A genuine questing and wresting. Volume on the slow increase. Using all my language.  All my characters. Une doctrine en même temps qu'une contrée. A kinetic experience, like driving in a desert.

A carbon copy on thin bank paper, so, in order to read it, you have to detach a page into free air so that the next doesn't show through. Some letters didn't print, not enough pressure on the keys; and you have to travel the xxxx where you changed your mind.

How would this read if it were in focus?

The narrative is already soft: drift and perversity in England in the mid-20th century. A lot of sensing and longing for sleep and the sea, for a spectacle in which you were, briefly, a performer.

A carbon copy on bank paper could be the ideal state.