Out of Africa, Karen Blixen

Out of Africa is clean, accurate, full and spare at the same time. For astonishing moments you're in Kenya circa 1925, society and landscape. Karen Blixen, Baroness Blixen of Denmark, had a view of where she was and whom she met and dealt with on her coffee farm outside Nairobi, that leaves any fictionalising like Binstead's Safari, Rachel Ingall's novel set in Africa that I read last week, gasping for breath. Out of Africa is not set in Africa, it constitutes seventeen years of Karen Blixen's life and experience of Africa.

She writes more about the squatters and the deputations, the Natives, the Mission and the Hospital, the dramas around her, than about her own feelings. Visitors from her European world, on the other hand, 'sometimes drifted into the farm like wrecked timber into still waters'.

We had many visitors to the farm. In pioneer countries hospitality is a necessity of life not to the travellers alone but to the settlers. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.

The real friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, comes back after one of his long expeditions, starved for talk, and they sit over the dinner table into the small hours. (Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Sorry.) The patrician Danish sensibility in Kenya, the observant/compassionate outsider, artist, inhabitant of her lands.

Standing like this in the limpid shadow, looking up towards the golden heights and the clear sky, you get the feeling that you were in reality walking along the bottom of the Sea, with the currents running by you, and were gazing up towards the surface of the Ocean.

Karen Blixen translated her own Danish. All these displacements, these translations, Denmark to Kenya, Danish to English, Angel to Native, Squatter to High Priest, confer clarity and a peace. Which, she said, was what she wanted, a peaceful landscape. She wanted to live among the people who were there in a peaceful landscape.

One day a High Priest came to visit, from India.

We could not speak a word to one another, for he understood neither English nor Swahili, and I did not know his language. We had to express our great mutual respect by pantomime. He had already, I saw, been shown the house, all the plate that it possessed was set out on the table, and the flowers arranged according to Indian Somali taste. I went and sat down with him on the stone seat to the West. There, under the breathless attention of the onlookers, I handed him over the hundred Rupees which were wrapped up in a green handkerchief belong to Choleim Hussein. 

Could be a model for Brexit.

Bookshelves, Rachel Ingalls, Karen Blixen

The act of skimming bookshelves is inherently musical; where you lean, what you miss, one year to the next, looking for something to read, is your slow movement, piano scales that run like Beethoven up or down.

Here are Four Stories by Rachel Ingalls that had disappeared from view. And her short novel Binstead's Safari. I read a review in the New Yorker about a reissue of Binstead's Safari; and the bookshelves move into a different key next time I look.

Four Stories, published by Faber in 1987, has Rachel Ingalls on the back cover, for all the world a Girton girl, clever, a little old-fashioned, with perhaps some early onset savagery under the girlish exterior. Her stories have all that.

Relationships familial and chilly, on the whole, important things happening in other countries, as in E.M. Forster, you can see things better from there, you can will the right outcome when you're away from home.

Kathy Acker—I keep looking at Great Expectations—is always away from home.

Binstead's Safari I read too fast, as if on rewind. Something too meaningful happening from the start. Too much Visible Preparation of Outcome. Woman blooms and ultimately is consumed by Fable and the Great White Hunter, by Elephant and Lion. Rachel Ingalls has too much meaning, she's a skilled tourist with too much significance on hold.

Karen Blixen is cleaner. She lived in Africa, came from Denmark. Out of Africa is maybe what I should read next.

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.

Lynne Tillman, American Genius, Fahrenheit 451, Alentejo

Lynne Tillman is an interesting intern to have on a trip; she doesn't let up or let out, even at the end. American Genius, A Comedy, has been on my shelves for about 12 years. The last time I read it there was an after-image like the scene in Fahrenheit 451 in which ghostly book persons walk and read in their heads to and fro in the mist. This time, wandering about Alentejo in Portugal, we are in tandem. Lynne Tillman's prose runs in bursts of a few pages, returning often to her skin & her gut & her cat & the other inmates of wherever she is staying, an artist residency, in all likelihood, in New England, which gave rise to or at least accommodated this long recessive wander into her life, and, as I move on this ramble of a holiday from Azoia to Evora to Alvito and other small towns and villages often beginning and ending with vowels, into my life. I do not have such a sensitive skin as our narrator—I am annoyed she calls herself Helen when all the time she is Lynne—but I sneeze royally, as integral to my being, and I can have a sensitive gut. We both have things to say and do about chairs. On this reading, on this trip through gloriously wild and quiet Alentejo, I can relate entirely to the run of her preoccupations, the past interleaving with the present, the cat with the dog, the dead with the living and all their sensibilities, followed by a well-anointed bath.

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov looked like a good choice for away reading. My edition is a relaxed, well-printed hardback from 1967 with a well-defined sunshine mark, yellow on the blue cover and spine. I have gone past it often on the shelves but have not been tempted to re-read. Bookless in Portugal seemed a good moment. At the last attempt I got as far as the second chapter on Pontius Pilate and lost patience. This time I skimmed Pontius Pilate, and limped through another chapter or two, unwilling as with food you can't eat for long.

Written in Stalin's Russia, the level of evasion and thickness of satire is more than I can bear: unusual strangers with jovial supernatural gifts, (the devil is always happy, I suppose), hauntings, vanishings, black magic, black cats, talking cats, a range of happenings and satire whose target is noisily suppressed. No, I can't read this, even if it inspired Mick Jagger. I'd rather listen to Sympathy for the Devil. Mick Jagger would be closer than I am to a Bulgakov who went back to religion to demonstrate freedom.

Holiday reading will be Lynne Tillman and Kathy Acker, who were both born the same year as me, both jewish and savage. They make the satire on Stalinist Russia look binary/scholarly. I will ramble around Alentejo, Portugal, with Tillman and Acker, and from the first page, on the plane out, I expect, I'll hear a loud rending sound.

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.

The Aspern Papers, Henry James, Cyril Cusack

A review of the new film of The Aspern Papers sent me back to the Henry James nouvelle. Impossible to read Henry James without a wilful sense of purpose and some confused memories. Without becoming Henry James. That coolness and remoteness in the fastnesses of language. Where does that leave you, and Henry James? Is it, despite the odds, a warm embrace?

Margaret Roberts, Miss American Pie, as she liked to call herself, with the warmest of irony on a warm night in Chicago, announced she was going back to Henry James. Perhaps half Henry James readers are re-readers.

This time I read The Aspern Papers in the light of a film I haven't seen. The reviews are poor, but I enjoyed the sense of Vanessa Redgrave in her eighties guarding her memories and her papers in Venice, while local (Cork) boy Jonathan Rhys Meyer, whom I have somehow never trusted, as Morton, tries to extract her secrets, and Joely Richardson, Vanessa's daughter, playing Tita Bordereau, the niece, her name in the film changed to Tina, to avoid embarrassment. Henry James had faces and shadows to fit Bordereau, aunt and niece, and so do I.

You can withdraw into Henry James, if you need a certain coolness yet intimacy, some swift strokes of the pen, an amused distance, not much empathy. He can annoy, royally, as well, when you choose the wrong moment to read him; his sentences can be tortured; and you the reader are tortured, too.

I best came to terms with Henry James circa 1973 when I had a television for the first time and watched a BBC adaptation of The Golden Bowl, with Cyril Cusack, amused in his armchair, holding the tale by its subtleties at the close of each episode.

Harry Martinson, Eyvind Johnson

I have spent much of the last week or two in early and mid-twentieth century Sweden. I read and then dipped into: Views from a Tuft of Grass by Harry Martinson (Green Integer Books 2005), and (It happened in) 1914 by Eyvind Johnson (Adam Books 1970).

For the summer of 1914 Eyvind Johnson, born 1900, worked a log jam, a log boom, up near the Arctic Circle, a boy among young men, and older men, often tubercular. He was a young man himself by the end. His childhood had come to an end, he said.

Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson were of a kind, rural autodidacts, coming out of the land and its work into, eventually, the Swedish Academy, they shared a Nobel prize in 1974. There was a Swedish Nobel furore that these two Academy members should be honoured. Harry Martinson—a tender portrait of him on the front cover—wasn't able for furore and killed himself soon after.  Eyvind Johnson's portrait on the back cover of the Adam edition shows a Nordic smile on an older face over a crisp white collar, under a slightly off-centre cap on what appears to be a rainy day by the sea.

When I was a child we experienced summer mostly as work, and now, much later, I realise that this was not necessarily the worst means. Somehow summer came closer that way. You took it by the hand and experienced it close to your eyes and nose. ... The inherent, drawn-out monotony of such work forced you to look for close contact with all living things.  (Summer, Harry Martinson)

Edward Gorey, Richard Avedon

For some weeks now a copy of the New Yorker in my room has been open at a photograph by Richard Avedon of Edward Gorey with a ginger cat around his neck, both of them looking downward into the dark of Mr Gorey's jumper, his beard and the cat's fur of a piece in black and white.

I found Edward Gorey in the Gotham Book Mart in 1980, his books, I mean. I was nosing about New York, pausing as I saw fit. The Gotham Book Mart, the Thalia cinema, Books & Co, another bookshop uptown, a record shop in Soho. Unaware that what I was doing was what people did in New York. I was walking, faster than I wanted, up and along New York streets, trying to find that natural, absorbing signs and untaken opportunities for services like full immersion tanks, reading advertisements of wares, considering displays of Chinese aluminium and perspex. 'I always wanted to look like this and now I do', said a young woman photographed in Soho around then. Not me. I had no idea I might look like this or what it was I always wanted.

Edward Gorey was also a shy man, nosing about in the Edwardian mode, privately having a laugh in the manner of Edward Lear and others. The era of Edward, indeed. The New Yorker article concerns a recent biography of Edward Gorey. Why read about the life of someone who created lives, in words and drawings, and was indifferent to his own? Like reading about a cousin you didn't know you had. Edward Gorey was a precocious child. Later, when asked about his sexuality, he said he supposed he was gay. He went to a lot of movies and was passionate about New York City Ballet. What more do we need to know?

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.

Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity

I've nearly finished Shyness and Dignity, another small hours immersive reading. Dag Solstad's nordic male run-on style of narrative hyphenates insomnia with ease—at the end of the hyphen you launch into sleep.

Whether it's Ibsen's character or Solstad's or the dear reader's there's a profound dismissal of all almost everything going on, including the eponymous shyness and dignity. All those repeated full names, Elias Rukla and Johan Corneliussen and Eva Linde, and addresses, the apartment at Jacob Aall's Gate, the Fagerborg Secondary School, dismiss themselves as soundly as the end of class bell at the said school. Students remove earbuds before class and then slouch.

However in last night's reading, one sentence rang out, well, several sentences.

People belonging to Elias Rukla's social stratum no longer talked together. Or only briefly and superficially. They practically shrugged at one another. Maybe to one another as well, in a sort of ironic mutual understanding. Because the public space required for a conversation is occupied.

The public space required. Yes. I wrote a story about an architect who designed an agora. He lived alone on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway accessible at low tide. A loner designing a public space. Requiring a public space. Needing a public space. Social interaction and building for the future. The architect did not know if he was waiting for the tide to go down or for the tide to come up.

Sebald, Vertigo, Dag Solstad, Josef Czapski, Auerbach

Read exclusively in the early hours, the last, il ritorno in patria, section of Sebald's Vertigo, has implanted itself in the back brain. Sebald went back to W., the village of his childhood, for the first time in thirty years, and stayed, we read, in the same building, an inn, he'd lived in as a child, for an indefinite period, he told the landlady, during which time he was virtually the only guest.

He inhabits W. as he did when he was a child: indefinitely.

The past is a prison, a foreign country. People speak differently there. If they speak at all.

In the post today came Lost Time, the prison-camp talks on Proust given in 1941 by Jõsef Czapski without a book to consult. Erich Auerbach similarly wrote Mimesis in a bookless place. Remembering what you've read when you're far from books (even a short way down the road or in another room in your own house) is one of the most acute exercises a human can perform.

In the meantime, unhappily, irritated, reading Shyness and Dignity by Sag Solstad. I do not take kindly to the whinge-boring-teacher story. Talk to them, I want to say. Talk.

Sebald, Vertigo, Dr K

Dr K. evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have long since become separated from the natural order of things. 

This is from Sebald's Vertigo, and this is one reader pausing on one page in the middle of the night, wondering how poor is the body and what are natural surroundings? Figments of our exercise, our memory, our travels, our reading and our forgetting, selon Sebald, and I would agree, while I am reading Sebald at any rate. What are the salient characteristics of your natural surroundings? Natural surroundings are a moveable feast. Dr K. would say there was no difference now between natural and unnatural surroundings.

Vertigo is the third Sebald in a row I've read. There's a point at which a writer can seem too close, and although you like them you need some distance and would really rather read something else. Insomniac lately, I read in order to distract myself into sleep.

Dr K. in Vertigo is Kafka and to this reader also a man who sold shea butter in the local market pending something more fruitful in the zone in which he'd trained. I am also Dr K., technically. As well as just K. The apartment on the same landing as mine in Paris, apparently empty, had K. on the door. I noticed it every time I came and went.

W.G.Sebald, The Emigrants

Edward Gorey said that for a year after he had read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann he felt as if he had t.b. This is a reader paradigm that could do with expanding. As I start another W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, I wonder what imprint is settling in on me?

A melancholic empathy, for one. Sebald's emigrants are solitaries: a former landlord, a former teacher, a great-uncle and an artist in Manchester, more or less jewish or touched with an empathy for the outsiderhood of jewishness that Sebald himself must have had.

Or is it the even mist of biography, the long sentences and the quietness that precedes as well as follows death (emigrants are inclined to be suicides for all they have lost or not found, even if jews, as my mother used to say, are not), that produces the après Sebald effect: the birds fall silent, memories intensify the mist rather than the features it obscures.

Sebald's own memories intertwine with these tales of people he knew; he is the quiet one whose shadowlands and diligent researches are at the service of those who succumbed to sadness. In fact Sebald, who is always there when others' narratives dwindle into silence, could be said to be paying the debt of their melancholy by his attention.

His great-uncle, for example, according to one of the doctors who knew him, had a longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember. Sebald, as gently as you can with the written word, reverses that.

Great-Uncle Adelwarth, and Sebald's primary school teacher, have not been fully extinguished after all. Sebald pulls from his uncle's old agenda book a narrative in the first-person full of wonder, the converse of his later longing for extinction.

The artist Max Ferber (is that why Sebald liked to be called Max?) donates a manuscript about how they got out of Germany into Suffolk or Manchester. A gift freely given: you can do what you like this, je te le confie. Or the writer has invented them. Peu importe.

Memory, says Great-Uncle Adelwarth at the end of his agenda, is a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

W.G.Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

To substitute metaphor for the concept: to write, said Roland Barthes. With a substrate of Roland Barthes and Brian Dillon and unseasonably warm, still weather, I start for maybe the third time The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, his walk down the Suffolk coast, a weave of internal, external coincidence and uncertainty with a warp of historical, geographical fact set up for us to absorb in a desolate landscape: internal, external.

These contemplative, melancholic yet factual men, I can keep pace with them, then rapidly I lose what I've read. It's the cloth I'm left with, and, this evening, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Sebald's Suffolk is a landscape I know, I know the quality of the light and the relief of the desolation. This is the east coast of England, opposite Holland or Belgium. The east coast stands for lost causes. St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. I always liked that. It gave me something to start from.

Sebald, Max to his friends, incomer of a few decades, living up the road in Norfolk, has transferred his needs onto this empty coast whose moments came maybe a hundred years ago, maybe a thousand, maybe now. He is open to every association, like the small train crossing a river and how it was surplus to requirements in China a hundred years ago and fetched up in Suffolk, proving the decline of the Empire of China, and then there was the Joseph Conrad Suffolk connection and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand story, the silk industry and the urn burial—these factual men are in shadowlands, if this is what they want.

Suddenly, exhausted from a maze of August landscape and historical reference, here is Sebald ready to visit Michael Hamburger outside a village called Middleton, fellow incomer from Germany, translator, ruralist.

It's like the music of Philip Glass, just when you can't take another repetition, another league out from land, the music breaks and you're back in familiar rhythms again.

Hamburger's pile of jiffy bags by a door—you keep them and there are always more than you need—could have been Sebald's. Coincidences run wild. In rendering these people he becomes them, lapsing into the their language, their context, as his own. Down the coast there's Swinburne who visited, with other melancholics in the late nineteenth century, the lost village of Dunwich which slid into the sea. Lost cause, if ever. And Edward Fitzgerald who translated the Rubiyat of Omar Khayam from Boulge Hall in Suffolk and died of ancestral distress and failing sight. And how Sebald, Max to his friends, came upon Boulge, the Fitzgerald seat, via a Dutch man of money wishing to settle thereabouts. These are some of the threads we ride among the rings of Saturn.

Objects in This Mirror, Brian Dillon

Objects in This Mirror by Brian Dillon is a collection of essays in a plump sturdy paperback (Sternberg Press) that has occupied my winter reading ground for a few weeks now. First I read the whole thing then had the book around in my room and read maybe the contents page, or some of an essay, then stared at the fire and let it settle.

What you put into reading is nothing like what you get out; reading is fermentation, not arithmetic.

To substitute metaphor for the concept: to write. [Barthes]

Barthes brought Brian Dillon into his right world. A writer, a teacher, somebody brings you on and you don't look back. For him it was Barthes.

They are eager to learn to really dance.

This is the caption under a soft fifties photograph of two girls in Moscow doing grands jetés, one smiling at the other, both at the height of the leap and aware of each other. Really dancing meant leaping. I have always had a soft spot for the leaping photos of Lartigue, for flying dreams and for a teenager dancing in the living room on her own when everyone had gone out, ballet music on the record player, like an orphan.

As well as essay titles in Objects in This Mirror there are sections: Curiosities, On Land, Pathologies, Image Files, Inaesthetics, Syllabus. The inner shopping list.

The artist Nina Katchadourian once said to me that her job as she sees it is to simply pay closer attention to the world than others do ...

The closer the attention to greater the pain and if you're lucky the pleasure—if the world you attend is complaisant with your vision. To dance, to write, to leap over things at your own speed. There's the nub, or is it rub?

In the introduction Brian Dillon suggests that the reader may as go straight to the essay at the end about Barthes, 'before any of the more contained and probably assured pieces that come before it'. I didn't do that, I read it where it came in the running order, but in the re-reading it was the essay about Barthes I went to first.

Walter Rose and F.M.Mayor

Good Neighbours is a difficult link on the winter bookshelf. Is it Ask the fellow who cut the hay? or Pond Life? Or, moving into fiction, F.M. Mayor The Rector's Daughter?

Walter Rose and F.M. Mayor were born a year apart in the south of England; his portrait and her novel are grounded in the same reality but daily lives barely intersect on their pages. The landed and the religious keep a respectful distance from Walter Rose's village, as the nitty gritty of pig and plough is separate from the classical Rector and his dutiful daughter in fictional Dedmayne, though some characters do good work in the village, and find it easier to talk to villagers than to their social peers. The rector's daughter confides most freely in Cook and in one surprising sentence we find a parson's wife teaching carpentry to village boys.

Typical of me that I put myself to bed for the day (yesterday) with several books and several sheets of paper for notes then slip into non-reading non-sleeping emerging only to finish The Rector's Daughter and then, after cursory scan of possible relatives on the shelves, start reading it again, like a child who can't wait to know it well enough to anticipate every word.

This is bookish occupation, imagination as absolute seeing, guaranteed by words and sometimes pictures. The comfort of knowing, of being there more than ever.

Our brain, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organisation, however faint, and it is from this that an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel too, than the previous state of ignorance.   

W. G. Sebald

Walter Rose, Good Neighbours

A fault on the landline means taking out a number of books from the shelves to get at the sockets behind. These are motley garden and nature, pond and botanical books. Among them, Good Neighbours, written by Walter Rose in the 1940s, with drawings by John Hookham.  I bought it in 1974, previous owner DH Pasmore signed in discreet pencil on the flyleaf.

Good Neighbours is a portrait of Haddenham, a village in Buckinghamshire, reaching back to the author's boyhood in the late 19th century in a village in post-enclosure England. All the needs of life were met here: food, shelter, tools, clothes, shoes. Once a week to the market town, a couple of hours in pony and cart, and some seasonal outwork in the flat plains between Haddenham and London, known as Going Uppards.

A contained, intimate, community has its own dialect, which shows up bright as a misprint in Walter Rose's modest writing. Witchert. Yolm. Stulch. Todge. Dillen. Slabbin. Greaves. Wimble, Sneds. Frim. Sidcut.

And habits that need reviving, like Chapter V, Gnawing It Out, which was a form of barter involving milk, potatoes or a joint of pork or mutton as part of wages, which could take as long as fourteen years to settle, ending with a toss of a sovereign between two men.

And another form of barter called Chop.

It was once explained to me that the chop system secured double advantages, a profit on the sale and on whatever was taken in exchange; and further, that when making the chop you had only to assure yourself that it was for something of greater value, and you might pleasantly dream of beginning with a donkey, changing it for a pony, and end up as the proud possessor of a blood horse!

That sounds very like selling a piece of old rope on eBay and through multiple exchanges ending up with a fine house overlooking a golf course. There's an edge to dreaming now. In fact, dreaming isn't any longer the right word now we're parted from potatoes, mangold wurzel and the cottager's pig.

The lore and cult of the pig formed a bond between the villagers, as strong as if it had been inherited. All understood it naturally, save, maybe, the Parson. He, poor man, fresh from college, could not be expected to know more than which was the head and which the tail... To call on a neighbour without asking 'How's the pig a-doing' was a plain breach of courtesy, not to be lightly excused. The walk round the garden on a Sunday, or of an evening, the detailed examination of the growing cabbages, the savoys, the sprouts, the beans and peas, would have seemed incomplete without a long and interested pause at the sty, and a learned discussion on the merits of the particular pig.

PG Wodehouse and Flann O'Brien, with different levels of mockery and affection, have seen fit to foreground the pig.

The joys of routing thus ended, nothing remained but surrender to the blisses of eating and sleeping. To grow fast, and grow fat, made exertion less and less desirable. What need for effort with life so bountifully full?

As well as future food the pig was wish fulfilment.

To sleep the sleep of the just was better—with eyes slightly open—emitting melodious snores—and so to wile away the sultry hours of summer; to stretch the long body at ease on the soft straw in the cool shade of the shed, head only at the doorway to sniff the fragrant air from the cottage garden and valley beyond. This was the life of the pig.

Henry Green, Doting

These dark evenings, Brahms' A German Requiem underlies Henry Green's Doting, his last book and an artifice so sustained (almost entirely by dialogue) that it needs some rolling Brahms to ground it.

These people—Middletons Payntons Addinsell and Belaine—are in and out of each other's pockets. They talk therefore they are history, they are fiction. It takes a few pages to figure who they are and how they know each other, and then you're away, they're away, on their multiple intrigues, their skirmishes in restaurants, in flats, in rooms, their weave, their fugue. They telephone a little, Arthur, Annabel, Diana, Charles and Claire, along with Peter, a son despatched to school or salmon fishing in Scotland, plus various convenient servants.

The last sentence of the book is: The next day they all went on very much the same.

The book is the part of the fish that shows above water in uneasy times. Are all times uneasy? Is there a void when you take away Brahms? Why doting, after living, loving, party going and blindness? What does doting mean?

This is how we make our exit. Henry Green wrote nothing else for the remaining twenty-two years of his life, or nothing that has remained.

Henry Green, Pack My Bag

The looping impetus of Henry Green's writing (his self-portrait Pack My Bag) reaches you slowly and you get to feel for this awkward aesthete with a conscience, with a forelock and a downward tall stance, who wrote novels the way a composer might work on a single tune for life  (Berlioz was like that). Always caution, reluctance, persistence. Apology almost. Deference. He wrote longhand, at night. I have mostly read him at night. He is a burrowing kind of writer, seeking out himself and his reader. Prose is a long intimacy between strangers, he said.

In his novels there's always something large missing, like the definite and indefinite articles, or narrative without conversation. His memoir can afford to be poignant. This was just before World War Two. He might die. And in case he does, here is what he feels like setting down of his life: this is what comes to mind. Semi-patrician family life in Gloucestershire, private schools, Oxford. These men in the 1930s and 40s (Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell) they were basking, you might think, in their privilege, armed with irony and self-consciousness. Of all those Henry Green is the one I would like to have known.

He didn't die in World War Two, he wrote a clutch more novels, all with one word titles; and then wrote nothing for twenty-two years. He did not write a self-portrait before his actual death. I guess he didn't feel like it by then. His novels and their titles would have to speak for him. Living. Loving. Doting. Back. Nothing. Concluding.

Roald Dahl and Henry Green autobiographies

Roald Dahl Boy and Henry Green Pack My Bag are coeval, more or less, memoirs of schooldays and just after. Roald Dahl stops after his schooldays. Henry Green, writing on the eve of World War Two in case he didn't survive, goes up to his falling in love. I haven't read much Roald Dahl, and none at the right age, whereas Henry Green came in on a tide of books predating my life that I read when I was in my twenties and thirties.

Roald Dahl was an entertainer, a tall boy with sisters in the 1920s. Norwegian. Henry Green, the pen-name of Henry Yorke, son of prosperous business people from the midlands. Roald Dahl's family were in business, too. Whatever that meant. Whatever the product, the material. They were established. Dahl and Yorke, Est., somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, good houses with good views, and good education. And this was the education from which they emerged. Roald Dahl's education was run through with beatings. Cruelty as formative. So what does he do? He writes warm/cruel tales for children. His letters home when he was at school were signed Boy.

Henry Green, formed in the soft valleys of Gloucestershire, writes cloudy novels of situations whose drama derives from weather, uncertainty and class difference. Pack My Bag is a self-portrait more than a memoir, an evocation rather than a tale, a sketch for a novel or the remains of a dream. He did come back from World War Two, he lived another thirty years, wrote nothing for the last twenty-two years of his life.

Henry Green's novels sit in a soft place akin to his home valley in Gloucestershire. Because their drama is that of gathering, eavesdropping, assembling and not quite getting there, though there are marriages and betrayals, there's a mist if not a fog and by the last page you feel that the writer, along with the characters, has only ever paused. The sentence is the thing that continues.

Giorgio Bassani, Oliver Sacks

I have had a slow, awkward time with a couple of books lately, author fatigue perhaps, plus reader's earlier pleasures not revived.

Book 6 of the Romanzo di Ferrara, The Smell of Hay, by Giorgio Bassani, left me unable to focus except on the eponymous haymaking episode in a graveyard–a semi-circle of scythes slowly advancing—as if these pages were for Signor Bassani the last threads of a cloth not sturdy enough to wear beyond his nostalgia—or mine. One other thing, just after the haymaking, was a list of relatives of the recently deceased Uncle Celio, including the name Ottolenghi. Having just made a recipe from the current chef of that name, involving red cabbage, grapes, juniper berries and blue cheese, inter alia, I started at that: some names you think must belong to only one person ever, and here they are, part of a tribe in a graveyard in Ferrara.

Oliver Sacks' The River of Consciousness similarly did not engage me. Not nearly as much as the red cabbage and grapes. I am not always open to the fascination of festination and aphasia, Darwin and Freud. Or only in a distant way, in honour of an earlier version of myself. Now and then I admired Oliver Sacks' ingenuity. He took twenty photographs of an almost motionless patient, who had, when asked about his frozen poses, said, what do you mean, I was just wiping my nose. The twenty photographs, when made into a flick book, clearly showed a man wiping his nose.

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

How do I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson? The only horror stories I've read are by Henry James and Wilkie Collins, both old enough for horror to vanish into style. Film is where horror comes into its own. Black and white. I read Shirley Jackson as if she wrote for film, black and white, with episodes in colour. I read her as an adolescent exploring her darkness. How would it be if I killed all my family except the sister I like, and the cat, and Uncle Julian. How would that be? Is this horror or everyday life?

The main character in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat, is eighteen but feels like a wilful twelve. She charts her daily routes like a board game, she buries things, pins things to trees, neatens the house on the days for neatening the house, distrusts all visitors and maintains all barricades.

Does this ring a bell?

The author photo on the Penguin Modern Classics edition shows a three-quarter view of a woman in pearls and glasses, with a full mouth and a downward outward look, a nearly wicked smile. I used to know women who had that look. The pearls could throw you off the scent, and the light brown hair softly pulled off the face.

Outright stories, like this one, make me uneasy. I wasn't able to put my own cards on the table in a story-like way. Horror stories are wish fulfilment stories. If we lived in this house, had always lived in this house, if we lived in this house even after most of it had burned down because They out there hated us until, some time after the fire, they decided to leave us alone, even leave us food, the children playing at a distance, as if we were owed respect. For what? For killing the rest of our family?

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

L.P. Hartley, aka Mr Leo Colston, aged almost thirteen and increasingly out of his depth in a heatwave in Norfolk, staying with his schoolfriend, Marcus, knew the dark and subtle arts of the go-between: anxious, willing to be devoted, trying to find out where best to invest, whom to adore, how to ask the right questions and stay out of the way while observing and absorbing like mad, finding yourself in medias res out of a simple desire to serve those who dazzle you, then when the vicissitudes of adult life are too much you write home to your mother and say you are not enjoying yourself any more.

I haven't read The Go-Between for many years. I have watched the film with the Pinter screenplay more often. Reading gets visceral if there's a good film of it. The chiaroscuro of film scenes and text. The central cricket match, for example. I have no knowledge of cricket. The film of The Go-Between is probably the high point of what I know about cricket. I can't read those two chapters without the film scenes hovering among the lines.

So I read as Pinter, and that is interesting in itself. I never met Pinter but a friend who knew him said that Pinter would like me, which was a suspect kind of remark, though part of it was pleasing.

Alfred Hayes, In Love, My Face for the World to See

The clocks change this weekend, ushered in by post-equinoctial northerlies, post-full moon, post-most things. A ripe moment for more Alfred Hayes. Yesterday I read In Love at a sitting then began My Face for the World to See. Alfred Hayes was born in Whitechapel in 1911, eight years before my father, who was born in Whitechapel too. They broke the same bread and fought the same wars. I can read Alfred Hayes as someone who is ten steps sideways from my father, or as a writer I have not read before whose run-on efforts to understand his lusts his losses and his melancholy are touching because few men run on, run in, like this, and because a daughter may colour in her father any way she chooses.

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café

Carson McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café takes you in hand from the start. She introduces eight men who gather in the store that will become a café, and tells the reader to think of them for the time being as a whole, not as individuals. The reader obeys. I wonder why I can enjoy this light managing tone from a writer in the American South, and not from a writer in the Irish South, where I live, and where light managing, or heavy, is an art, especially among women. Carson McCullers writes about outsiders, misfits, a trio of them in this story are an exploration of her own outsiderhood. She is of the South, fed by the South even when, still hungry, she has moved away. This is why I don't mind being managed.

What I absorb when I read Carson McCullers is the isolated small town, the life of the countryside, the music of the prose (Carson McCullers trained as a concert pianist), and the three awkward characters, so awkward they must be saying something beyond themselves: Miss Amelia, rich, a good businesswoman, unnaturally big and strong, Cousin Lymon, a hunchback, and Marvin Macy, handsome and almost as tall as Miss Amelia, but a bad lot.

The café, like the relationships between these three, is an interruption to the desolation of the town, not a permanent transformation. The rise and fall of the café is the rise and fall of the story.

.... the hunchback was sickly at night and dreaded to lie in the dark. He had a deep fear of death. And Miss Amelia would not leave him by himself to suffer with this fright. It may even be reasoned that the growth of the café came about mainly on this account; it was a thing that brought him company and pleasure and that helped him through the night. So compose from such flashes an image of these years as a whole. And for a moment let it rest.

The state of Georgia in the middle of the last century is far away and thus more easily a narrative, almost a tale told on a cold night. Miss Amelia's shop sold feed, guano, farm implements, and staples such as meal and snuff. Goods were in sacks which a small person like the hunchback could sit on. She also distilled her own liquor of a peculiar, invisible power, like a message written in lemon juice and held to a flame.

Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man — then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harboured far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended.

In the Irish South, I am fed by the land, but do not seek to play out my own inner dramas in the lives of people I know here; I am in the South but not of it. I feel implicated but not involved. I am allergic to the picturesque, easily irritated by the local. Perhaps this is why I do not write novels. And yes, like Carson McCullers, I am still hungry.

Alfred Hayes, The Girl on the Via Flamina

Halfway through The Girl on the Via Flamina by Alfred Hayes, the eponymous girl reminds the narrator that she is just a girl, an Italian girl the narrator met in the war, an adventure, and one day she'll be a story he'll tell his fiancée.

The one you pretend not to have. It will amuse her when you are in bed together. Your story about the Lisa you met in Rome. ....  It will be very funny, she said. How once in Rome during the war you lived with an Italian girl because she was . . . unlucky.

At first I found the book dull and simple, with screenplay detail down to the tassels on shoes and the shine on puttees. Like the writing of Ernest Hemingway but stripped of swagger and then turned inside out. The back cover blurb uses words like spare and searing, as if it were a fifties film. You have to read it in black and white, except for the bedspread, which is red. Alfred Hayes did become a screenwriter, after the war, in Italy and then in America. His narrator is a man in a war, seven thousand miles from home. She was hungry, I was lonely, that's the story, he says, pitching it to himself. This is far from a romance, though on maybe three pages it almost becomes one; and the impossibility of it can be more poignant than the real thing. Winter in Rome in 1944 is far from almost everything, including the war. To live inside the war, with the war outside, in the hills, in the next country, and the one after that, is perhaps worse than fighting, there is time to know what you don't have.

One lived peculiarly, and only at odd moments did the actual peculiarity of one's own life become altogether clear.

The narrator's state of mind is there in the author photo on the back cover of the book, a weary vulnerability inside an American haircut, learned in Italy in World War Two, and in Whitechapel, where he lived until he was three, when his family, immigrants already, moved to America.

By the time I reached the end of the book I wanted to read it again, to sense how the writing renders that peculiar life in wartime Rome, with allies everywhere, bearing chocolate and condensed milk, and hunger everywhere else, partisans in the hills and home embedded in the fruitcake your mother sent, though you didn't like fruitcake. On the first read I wondered how he'd manage the ending, which was bound to leave everyone lonelier than before, and when it came, as a single page chapter with a three-word final paragraph, I was impressed, and started the book again to see how he'd got there.

L.P. Hartley, The Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

With one chapter to go in the Eustace and Hilda trilogy I feel like an (unfamiliar) child who doesn't want to leave home. The home in question is that quiet, limited place that existed before I was born or when I was very young, without politics or any world events I could begin to think about. Eustace does not do world events, his slim gilt soul, created, as his friend Anthony says, by his sister Hilda, can only accommodate the world he knows and the other, much larger, fed by reading, of his fantasy. As he slips about among versions of how things will be, if Hilda marries into an old and landed family, if he himself becomes a novelist gliding among the aristocratic ex-pats of Venice or Rome, I can feel myself abandon every current contemporary difficulty, whether Brexit or the local bollixes who make ragged my own dreams.

I come back reluctantly. A sentence from W.G. Sebald (After Nature) forms a cushion under my return to this life. Sometimes a sentence is enough.

                 Our brains, after all,
are always at work on some quivers
of self-organisation, however faint,
and it is from this that an order
arises, in places beautiful
and comforting, though more cruel, too,
than the previous state of ignorance.

L.P. Hartley, The Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

A letter in The Guardian Weekly recently, from a reader in Texas, said he was writing notes in the flyleaf of some of the more unusual books he read, so that future readers, if any there were, might have an introduction to books they mightn't have heard of. It is an act of faith, that someone in the future might open a book and find one reader's response on the flyleaf and so be encouraged to read it. A generous-spirited idea, though it confirms that books and reading seem to need special pleading, special behaviours and rare levels of encouragement.

When I am feeling low about books and reading, I might well turn, as I did a week or so ago, to L.P. Hartley's Eustace and Hilda trilogy, which I have read about twenty times since I first bought it in the early seventies. It must be the recessive, perhaps faux-modeste narrator who calls me back each time, plus the quiet narrative and social assumptions of about seventy years ago. This is comfort reading, confirmed by the exceptional quality of old Faber paperbacks, which have travelled through so many readings and emerged reassuringly bent towards the end but sturdy as ever. Today I read a a few chapters of the third volume up at the reservoir on a cloudless day, still warm for the end of September, both the book and the afternoon. I was negotiating Venice with Eustace, watching a magpie take a bath at the water's edge, and sometimes closing my eyes for these two scenes and all their virtues to marry.

.... events never moved while you were watching them, and his own particular scrutiny, he sometimes felt, had a peculiarly arresting effect. He becalmed things.

Only when he turns his back on things do they change and take him by surprise. Eustace and Hilda are brother and sister, with low parental presence (the mother died young and the father not much older) with one of those aunts in literature who take the place of parents but are so much quieter. The sibling friendship similarly takes the place of other kinds of relationship that L.P. Hartley, a frightened gay, could not describe or perhaps even contemplate. Eustace is mainly concerned with managing, or trying to manage, Hilda's relationships; all the worry he and his creator may have had on their own behalf, is transferred to Hilda.

Whether or not this blog survives the predations of bots and spam-slingers, I have no desire to sully the Faber flyleaf.

William Gerhardie, The Polyglots, The Beautiful Summer, Cesare Pavese

In Cork City R is reading The Ginger Man, which is funny, he says, smiling, and M is reading John Banville whom she finds very self-conscious. This is part of the local mycelium of reading. I trawl Vibes and Scribes on a Saturday morning and pause most by something autobiographical about Daphne Du Maurier and leave with nothing.

I have been reading William Gerhardie, The Polyglots, and The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese, one very long and the other very short.

I have looked at what passes for communication around this blog and found in the contributing sites and urls non-visitors from unknown regions and pornsites. It is hard to believe I am in any way speaking to friends.

So I am considering my options.

William Gerhardie when he was a child home for the holidays, sat on the hat rack and imagined he was a bird.

Norman Douglas, Old Calabria

Why Old Calabria now, on a drizzly day in County Cork, with territorial bad dreams occupying my head? Old Calabria is a thick-papered hardback from a 1990s Picador travel series, written by Norman Douglas about a hundred years ago. He was a friend of Elizabeth David, who was roaming food in France and Italy when he was a grand old bon vivant, a taste of European Englishhood in the era after Grand Tour travel. Norman Douglas, though rich, wasn't quite an aristo, he was a cultural refugee with a strong nostalgie de la boue, in need of the liberty of someone else's history, someone else's landscape.

OId Calabria is a rich, eccentric read in 2018, era of saturation tourism, with European cities foundering, visitors lodged in all styles everywhere. Norman Douglas, ex-Scot, ex-diplomat, adoptee Italian, writer and seeker after the perfect moment, finds lodgings that airbnb could not conceive. Here he is at a railway station late at night:

On my arrival in the late evening I learnt that the hotels were all closed long ago, the townsfolk having gone to bed 'with the chickens'; it was suggested that I had better stay at the station, where the manageress kept certain sleeping quarters specially provided for travellers in my predicament.

Certain sleeping quarters exhale an indescribable esprit de corps, he says, at the start of an eventful night in which we acquaint with his scanty stock of household remedies: court plaster and boot polish, quinine, corrosive sublimate, and Worcester sauce (detestable stuff, but indispensable hereabouts, he says), and the possible interest of the flea-ridden, already occupied couch in a cowshed (I would like to know what is corrosive sublimate).

Herein lies the charm of travel in this land of multiple civilisations—the ever-changing layers of culture one encounters, their wondrous juxtaposition.

Such a traveller, sleeping in cowsheds and worse, researching flying monks and ravening Saracens, walking all day to find no food at the inn. I read more than half the several hundred pages this afternoon, while the drizzle tried to occupy the dry land, and large earth-movers down the lane prepare for tarmac. Norman Douglas found that towns that cleaned up lost their charm. My dreams echo this almost every night. I can't engage with the history he seeks out, but his instincts as he travels Old Calabria ring true.

A landscape so luminous, resolutely scornful of accessories, hints at brave and simple forms of expression; it brings us to the ground, where we belong ....  The sage, that perfect savage, will be the last to withdraw himself from the influence of these radiant realities. ... From these brown stones that seam the tranquil Ionian, from this gracious solitude, he can carve out, and bear away into the cheerful din of cities, the rudiments of something clean and veracious and wholly terrestrial—some tonic philosophy that shall foster sunny mischiefs and farewell regret.

We travellers go where we will, even at home. From gracious solitude to cheerful din. Sunny mischiefs  and farewell regret. Norman Douglas first spoke German, then Russian, then Italian.; he wrote in English. No wonder he reads like a translation; he is a translation. A Scottish not quite aristo with German & Russian experiences at loose in Old Calabria, reshaping at will in chicken and cow sheds. 

Robert Creeley, Virginia Woolf

Take Creeley, seize him by his surname, and Virginia Woolf, to give her both her names, set his tiny Hanuman book, printed in Madras, beside her Penguin Classic mode, and you have the shock of our common yet multifarious pasts, his awkwardly analytical, hers embedded with relief in her words.

Creeley pauses towards the end of his autobiography on a line from Ginsberg—'And the sky above, an old blue place'—that Zukovsky was shy of, he said, because it fouls up the gauges, makes them stick. I have read the previous 99 pages waiting for gauges to be fouled, if not shattered, if not rhapsodised.

In 1939 when she was 51, Virginia Woolf wrote in 'A Sketch of the Past', that it was her shock-receiving capacity that made her a writer, writing puts the severed parts together, that Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet are the truth about this vast mass that we call the world.

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

How would 'A Sketch of the Past' read as in a Hanuman Book printed in Madras?

I like to read the page as well as the words, the non-being as well as the being. Poets of the Creeley mode are less concerned with the page, or unlucky with their publishers. Tiny Hanuman does for his thoughts on this life for which he has responsibility, as he puts it on page one, 'a substantial life, like a dog, but hardly as pleasant, to be dealt with no matter one could or couldn't, wanted to or not'.

Creeley the poet is uncomfortable with the task of autobiography; Virginia Woolf tunes her sketch of the past into her writing mode. Her life or the life of someone she sits opposite on the train down from London to Sussex, one she knows and the other she can imagine: tis all the one.

Creeley is a poet, unconscient of the page, the shock, keeping everything under his surname. Virginia Woolf is a poet also,

Robert Creeley, Autobiography

Robert Creeley's Autobiography published in tiny, wonky, format by Hanuman Books, Madras and New York, in 1990, you can read alongside anything, alongside Chopin, and the ripeness of summer.

A friend's father showed us how to make willow whistles and a more enduring kind from short lengths of copper or lead pipe we'd cut with a hacksaw, to make the notch, then pull partially with wood at one end. I recall there being endless things to learn and do of that kind, slingshots, huts (as we called them) in the woods, traps, and a great proliferating lore of rituals and locations, paths through the woods, secret signs, prisons for all manner of imaged possibility including at one point the attempt to make a glider out of bed sheets and poles tied together.

I have been a shy reader of poetry, preferring what poets say once they've slipped into something more comfortable, once they've made a flute out of willow and written a hundred hand sewn pages, approx 3 by 4 inches, of autobiography in an apartment block in Helsinki in the late eighties.

Creeley, we are in a land of surnames, like Ginsberg, Zukovsky, Williams, Duncan, Olson, makes his world, or he knows where it is, and it's somewhere along the road to his understanding of what consitutes manhood.

So it's probable that what I most wanted was a world, if not of that kind, at least of that place. ... It seemed absurd to go where there were no relationships.

He has his place, his people, but not his father or his left eye or his daughter Leslie, who died age eight. He has a measure of success. The kind that poets concede rather than enjoy. He has the span of literature to situate himself among. Homer and Hesiod onward. These men, they take comfort in each other's surnames. And there are some ground rules.

'To tell the truth the way the words lie.'

Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

In recent weeks I have been to late nineteenth century Brazil and nineteen thirties Russia. Today I felt like coming home to Virginia Woolf in first world war England—less England than her inner life as it settles into words. Ten pages of the story/essay The Mark on the Wall were enough to release me on this rare—this summer—wet afternoon.

I have never been drawn to meditation but I like contemplation and the vagaries of idle thought, especially in a familiar place. Virginia Woolf in her chair with her writing board and her cigarette after tea, notices a mark on the wall and that mark leads her hither and yon.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it...

So does she—swarm, lift, carry and leave her mark on the wall, on the page. She is mannered and idle by today's standards. She is not going anywhere that she knows about in advance.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse.

She wants, she writes, to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. So this is home, and home is the place you can think from, sink from, into fluid intermingled non-facts. We need more of those.

Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's though as a fish slices the water with his fin ...

From the mark on the wall she moves into trees—

first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding sap of the storm; then the slow delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.

Reading is like a series of baths, salt, sweet and aromatic.

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

Epitaph of a small winner, or, literally translated, 'posthumous memoirs of Braz Cubas', came out of Brazil in 1880, written by Machado de Assis, whose own ill-health encouraged him to look at life from beyond the grave as a modest, playful sequence of not-quite-events; he brushes by everything long enough to recognise and toss aside what he will not achieve. So be it.

Here is a brush with paternity, for example.

One afternoon the castle of my paternal fantasies crumbled to dust. The embryo went away, at that stage at which a Laplace and a turtle look very much alike... I leaned against the window and looked out at the grounds behind the house, where the orange trees were turning green.

All we might count as major in life is brought to size in 200 pages of epitaph; frankness, as he says, is most appropriate to a defunct. 19th century Brazil could be Portugal, could be Spain or Italy or Argentina. Clarice Lispector's Brazil half a century later included a larger swathe of society. She had the blow-in's curiosity about the entire society she had entered at the age of one. Machado de Assis was born of a washerwoman and a wall painter. He emerges from his past without looking back. His books are what he created for himself, his modest ascent represented by Braz Cubas, narrator of this epitaph.

Here he is in chapter 24, Short but Happy.

I was prostrate with grief. And yet my character in those days was a faithful compendium of triviality and presumption. The problem of life and death had never troubled my mind; until the day of mother's death. I had never looked down into the abyss of the inexplicable, for I had lacked the essential stimulus, the confusion of mind resulting from a personal catastrophe.

He views life on a clean sheet each time; every abyss is enviably new. His life may be modest but it is examined, with relief.

How glorious to throw away your cloak, to strip off all your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you were and what you failed to be!

Machado dictated this novel to his wife. It reads quick and light, apologetic and explanatory, leaping over loves lives ambition and death like a gazelle in a theme park. In later life he suffered from epilepsy and eye problems, and thus, some think, found this dreamy talking style, talking to yourself via your most trusted listener, saving any trace of misery for the last sentence of the last chapter: 'I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery.'

There are several ways of belonging. One is you're born to it. Another is you fabricate it in such words as you can call up from your own particular abyss before you fall into it.

Sholokov, Platonov

Down at the rocky swimming spot in Ballycotton sat a man reading a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov—I couldn't see which one—a day or two after I finished Happy Moscow. A spicy synchronicity. Stalin approved of Sholokhov, while Platonov was deemed unpublishable. Ballycotton can take them all—the choppy blue water and the thoughtful rope for hauling yourself out—and a reader down here who is not me, which is comforting, luxurious.

Back home I looked out Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned on the bedroom bookshelves—reserved for childhood books and early independent purchases—one of those sunset-flavoured paperback covers with horses and wooden wagons and workers and scythes marching into the blaze of soviet realism—yes, if you can name it it probably doesn't exist. Any nation whose chief newspapers claim to be Reality and Truth must be deceived and deceiving much of the time.

I don't think I can read it now. I can catch the flavour (there are too many epithets, a forced grandeur, tons of moral imperative, yellowed cracky paper, tight print), read a few chapters, groan through the worthy translation, weary with the urgency of it all. What did I make of it in 1965? Why did I buy it? It was Russian and I identified with that, plus the title had an allure for a future gardener. I could not yet place the politics, the allegiances. Some writers work for a barely-knowing larger audience, a readily mythifying public. And Quiet Flows the Don is his most read book. Another alluring title. Don't be fooled. Even if did take 28 years to write.

Platonov is a desert writer, an urban writer out of the desert. Sholokhov is a romantic ruralist. Nothing like a good Cossack struggle. I would rather take Platonov to my desert island.

Platonov, Happy Moscow

Platonov's Happy Moscow has given me several stunned reading moments. The beginning of chapter 5 launches me into a prime 4 a.m. reverie. No, that's not the word. An uncanny sense of being as awake as I'll ever be, both soothed and alert.

Sambikin's economy with time made him untidy and slovenly, and the world's external matter felt to him like an irritation of his own skin. Day and night he followed the world-wide current of events, and his mind lived in a terror of responsibility for the entire senseless fate of physical substance.

Sambikin/Platonov absorbs and processes Stalin's Russia in the 1930s. I absorb, albeit at some distance, and would rather not process, the compound stare of Putin/Trump and wall-to-wall Brexit.

At night Sambikin took a long time to fall asleep, because he was imagining the labour, now lit by electricity, that was in progress on Soviet land. He saw structures, densely equipped with scaffolding, where unsleeping people came and went as they fastened down young boards made from fresh timber so as to be able to remain up there, high up, where the wind blows and from where night, in the form of the last remnant of the evening glow, can be seen moving along the edge of the world.

The awkwardness of translation, I like to think, is appropriate. Absurdity has to be scrupulous or it dissolves. Platonov is already translating Stalin's invented language, his invented reality. The only way I can absorb the absurdity of now is through the absurdity of then. I have difficulty reading newspapers. I do not officially live in a dictatorship. I cannot, as Platonov does, take the dictator's dictates, his language, and undermine it one comma at a time. There is not a dictator where I live, but there are many out there eating the ether and spitting it out, so we are all doused. Sad to say.

Happy Moscow fractures from the start. We have bad dreams. Blood is pouring from multiple fissures. Sartorius, sleepless, invents a weighing machine for weighing weightless things. Like filth and scum embedded in wounds. Like the sudden thrusting life a corpse could have.

Investigating more precisely, speculating about all this almost constantly, Sambikin came to believe that the moment of death some kind of hidden sluice must open in the human body, and that from it there flows through the organism a special fluid which poisons the pus of death and washes away the ash of exhaustion, and which is carefully preserved all through life, right up to the moment of supreme danger. 

Whenever that may be. It's a relief if there's a moment, like the end of a drought, or an electric storm, rather than the drift of history, insinuation of language, algorithms, unease, then or now.

Pierre Ryckmans and Simon Leys

I have one book by Pierre Ryckmans and one by Simon Leys, who are the same person. Why he does it I don't know, but the use of of two names gives full play to the doubt that permeates the average thinking life. In content, these two books are approximately polemic and reflection. Pierre Ryckmans The View from the Bridge is a series of lectures published in 1996 in Australia, where he lived and taught for many years. The Simon Leys was published in 2008 by Sylph Editions in London as one of their Cahier series. Notes from the Hall of Uselessness is a selection of pieces from the eponymous Hall, his writing room, where, as I can fully imagine, he contemplates the usefulness of the useless. Both books are permeated with Chinese thought and culture, and thus, for the European reader, they hang suspended in air of their own.

In presentation they are both slim volumes, but there the resemblance ends. The Cahier series published by Sylph are a model of thoughtful typesetting and design. The Australian book, published by the Australian Broadcasting Company, has an overlarge font and charmless layout. Does it matter?  Yes, for the way the reader is or isn't encouraged to read, and reflect. John Berger describes how, on first sight of a new book, he so disliked the production that he burnt it straightaway, which is a tad highhanded if a successful writer's privilege.

Pierre Ryckmans argues and implants ideas, he is not above being a perplexed old man. His chapter headings, in ABC's aggressively electronic font, are Learning, Reading, Writing, Going Abroad and Staying Home. Simon Leys, from the heart of the Hall of Uselessness, moves among words, music and silence, examines perfection and imperfection, listens with Glenn Gould to a sonata for piano and vacuum cleaner. The thinking and the layout of the page invite the reader to stop reading and look around, look back and forth.

I look forward to reading Notes from the Hall of Uselessness up at the reservoir. And then, settled in our spot, I note the local flora, go for a swim and fall asleep. 'Truth is grasped by an imaginative jump', is one of Simon Leys' headings. Truth is also grasped by falling asleep in the sun.

I like both writers, Pierre and Simon, Ryckmans and Leys. Though it's Simon Leys I would take to a desert island for his freedom, his interiority. If that isn't the Cahier style bringing me on.

Pierre Ryckmans chose Chinese and a pen-name, Simon Leys, and Australia. I chose French, and to keep my name, and Ireland, and Europe. Ryckmans is known for having debunked Chairman Mao before most had figured it. There is only one thing worse than being wrong and that is being right before anyone else.

Polemics leave me confused as to who scored which goal in what argument why. I like consensus conversations. I like to build à deux or alone, or with Mozart, or Chopin, and a writer who reflects. I find it hard to maintain an argument, I forget what it's for, or can't believe that any view of mine will hold, let along swing anything, which for a strong woman is a strange confession.

It is good to know that the hall of uselessness where Pierre/Simon/Judy write is useful for running all this before the mast.

Last night I dreamt of a drone attack, and later Mickos said I looked sad. That's how I feel about polemics as I build with Mozart over a shorn hayfield in Ireland's heatwave which is on the way to becoming a sea.

Clarice Lispector, Turgenev, Edward Louis

I have had Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier in continuo for many weeks. I like to have her around, interspersed with other reading. The last ten pages are overlaid by Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, read up at the pond, beside the reservoir and at night, finished a day or two ago, now replaced by Edouard Louis' A History of Violence, which has been in the house for a week or so, giving off some strong issues and flavours none of which appeal.

Sandie said that the way I live and read and write will only register after I'm dead. Not sure how comforting or accurate that might be. So I weave books around my sensibility where others weave goals, teams and aspirations. So?

What is language doing for these writers, this reader? How dependent are we? How involved how absent how urgent the tale? Clarice is the most urgent/dependent/absent; she has the least tale, the most setting of private dials. How do I deal with the world, what are the terms for my survival? What happens is less than what I make of it, how I weave it in words that in turn weave me. 

No tree, no rock, nakedness up the horizon of erased mountains; her heart was beating superficially and she was hardly breathing as if in order to live it was enough to look.

Turgenev's familial Russian decrepitude, I know as I begin to read, I expect these characters in these relations in nineteenth century rural Russia, with authorial pieties all observed: plenty fathers, plenty sons, mothers dead or otherwise meek, some crocky aunts and eccentric uncles living on lapsed or creaking country estates, a sense of roundedness by tale's end, some dead, some married, and Turgenev our author resembling one of his own uncles, à la fin. A peaceful, comfortably foreign past.

Edouard Louis, feu Eddy Bellegueule, is hardly older than Clarice Lispector when she wrote The Chandelier, but his history of violence is a mass of influences while she, like Bazarov the nihilist/natural scientist who dies of typhus at the end of Fathers and Sons, springs from her own source.

The influences of Bellegueule/Louis are the bootstraps of his rescue. He has read Bourdieu, and Faulkner, he attracts issues and issues attraction. He is at the centre of 21st century concern. Saleable. Recountable. Translatable. His author photo looks like someone I know. I read the first chapter with the most fairness I could muster.

Eddy & Clarice make an interesting couple, each as self-preoccupied as the other, one of them plain as the Daily Mail, the other rhapsodic/self-examining. Here they are, side by side.

It was then that she experienced all the way to the end whatever it was whose foreboding had already worried her at the edge of the plateau. With a contained joy, flashing and fine, she was in the meadow ...  you understand? she was asking herself confused, her dark eye watching to the rescue of the whitened mountains.

I looked down at my shoes like I was a moron too (I tried to go back to sleep, I wanted to sleep, but my body hurt too much). And he says to me, I hated everyone, I know it's crazy, Clara, but that morning I woke up hating everyone (and I thought: How can you hate them?).

Take your pick.

Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier

Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier, written when she was 23, calls up my diary's desert years, in my early twenties, which you can't so much read as taste and then pause. No crevice left unexplored, unsaid. Clarice had a firmer grasp on the stuff of her life than I did. She pulls back from the brink of what can't be said, and then says it.

That's when things became real. Who'd forced her to speak, who: she could cry scared and tired in that instant because if there were a strange phrase to say it would be: please pass me the olives.

She is persistent; you can choose any sentence in The Chandelier and there it is.

He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence.

She has the muscularity of what she looks at. She is resolute. She uses many verbs. I avoided verbs, unless in the subjunctive mood. I liked (abstract) nouns. I was deflected, diluted and hung out to dry in the groves of academe. I was reading Mallarmé and trying to comprehend my solitude and its diary.

and to tell me not to speak
would be to tell me that
all I ever said was but
a crevice long in the wood
in the frame of a picture
I thought was not mine alone.

With Clarice there's a push to make clear the connect/disconnect of the outer to the inner world. Here is every last thought and observation, every conjecture.

Reality was laughing at all of them. She was arranging the flowers with all her fingers. Her barely-present lips were hiding in shadows born from the position of her head.. Her breasts were growing congested squeezed by her clothes, her hips were widening with fatigue, without beauty.

Tuesday 9th June 1970, JK's diary takes a rueful look at itself.

It will perhaps be the one triumph of this diary to have written itself both in and out of existence. 

On the 17th of July 1970 I recorded the bus conductor's conversation with one of his passengers. How he was going to Jersey this year with the wife, £42, cottage of course, including the fare, and that's £18, so it's not bad. Other people's reality butted in verbatim with a certitude I could only keep in reserve. Other people's lives. Clear as fiction.

Clarice, bless her, is always in existence, batting about among her certitudes, wrangling her definitions.

Stubborn, she was staring at her face trying to define its fleeting magic, the softness of the movement of breathing that was lighting it and slowly putting it out. The corruption was bathing her in a sweet light. So there she was. So there she was. There was no one who could save or lose her. And that's how the moments were unfurling and dying while her quiet and mute face was floating in expectation. So there she was. Even yesterday the pleasure of laughing had made her laugh. And ahead of her stretched the entire future. 

You can pick any few pages, any few lines, and there she is, seeking herself out, losing and then seeking, saying it all: the truth was so fast you had to squint to see it. In the diary of JK age 23, the truth was so submerged you had to drown to find it.

And the more dire the dead end, the long sheet of failure, gales that are perplexity incarnate.

The Chandelier and JK's diary are alike intense, best tasted in essence, like lavender, then left to rest. These two young women are scrupulous and relentless, JK all metaphor and remove, Clarice all tongue and fire, both strung out on the effort, torture, pleasure, of trying to clarify.

Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume

Reading A Certain Plume by Henri Michaux up by a certain pond watching a certain diver beetle surface, once, and a certain caddis fly pupa in the shape of a small leafy cigar, swim northeast a few inches under the water.

What he searches for in books is revelation. He skims through them. Suddenly, to his great delight, a sentence ... an incident ... whatever ... something there ... At which point he proceeds to levitate toward this something with everything he has within him, at times clinging to it as iron to magnet.

Yes. Yes also to his account of his reading habit.

His attention span was short, and even when interested in something, he noticed little, as if only an outer layer of attention were opening in him, but not his 'self'. He just stood there, shifting his weight back and forth. He would read a great deal, very quickly and very poorly. This is the form his attention took ... And if he tried to read slowly, to 'grasp' the subject: nothing! It was as if he was reading blank pages. But he was quite capable of rereading, as long as he went fast, as can easily be imagined.

Recognising someone else on the page is one of life's safe places. As Virginia Woolf said:

I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy—to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am neat as a cat in my habits. 

If anyone can make Virginia Woolf sound domestic it's Henri Michaux. He makes the going for himself; all his repetitions refusals and reversals, his disregard for style, his preference for overt dismissal, he turns his back at the drop of a hat, freezes, then runs away. You feel the satisfaction of the bottom of the page. There, that's laid out, there, direct from his inner basin to the page.

He lived for years, eyes on his inner basin.

A Certain Plume has an introduction by Lawrence Durrell from 1958. He met Michaux: 'a voice from the past, a stone-age voice full of veridic information about the state of mind in which poetry declares itself an absolute value.' Michaux is an acclaimed senior in the vatic trade, says Durrell.

The important thing was the moment of complete realisation, the old déclic which is always followed by a subtle shift of epicentre. Wholeness arrives!

My father liked to bring Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet into a conversation. Alongside Der Rosenkavalier. Our styles define us, our tastes, especially those we flaunt.

Isabella Tree, Wilding

Wilding by Isabella Tree was delivered by the postman through car windows as we were on our way to the reservoir for a swim. I read the first few chapters on the beach, as we like to call the grey stony southern rim of Cork's water supply. I'm usually alert to whatever is happening on the land around, which weeds shine through, which have vanished, what machinery is out there and to what effect, as well as local weather and how warm the water has become.

Wilding is the kind of book that makes you ten times more alert than you were before. Every strewn coffee cup every felled tree every strimmed verge. Short of leaving copies in public places — but nobody reads — my son does, said my neighbour in the fish queue this morning — it's had to know what to do. And what to do is of the essence. Bernard Loughlin, former director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, said it was his privilege to testify to his idealism. He did something. He looked after a place where artists and writers and musicians came to stay. Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell are doing something on Charlie's ancestral 3,500 hectares. We are doing something here.

All of this is easier to believe when the weather is as warm and settled as for the last week or more. Easier to believe that every move has consequences. That there is a natural flux and an unnatural growth. You read Wilding down at the reservoir on a broody warm Wednesday, and you have no idea what may come of it, but feel optimistic.

Agota Kristof, Trilogy

Do I have to come to Spain to remember I can read in french? For a few days with my old friend Annette in Puerto Banus (Port of Abuse, as the judge would have it) I took with me Agota Kristof's trilogy, which I haven't read since I first did, in the nineties. The familiar foreignness, the edge of french, brings the sense of isolation and retreat that I cherish on beaches. To be alone and warm turning over and back in your space in the sand, your reading senses are acute. Before I even got to the beach I'd read much of the first volume on the plane. In fact, each volume I read so fast that, in order to save some for later, I dipped about in what I'd read to find again what was so astounding. You can read and reread, turn over and back in the sun, and still not know. This is beyond knowing.

Agota Kristof learned french after escaping to Neuchâtel from Hungary in 1956; her french is clear as a bell, frightening, almost, the french you learn in Switzerland when you have escaped from seismic politicks and deep chill at the age of twenty-one.

Her french sounds as if it has been recently learned, under pressure and with relief, by children at school. The lessons her resilient twins set themselves in Le Grand Cahier, volume 1, are frightening in any language.

Exercice d'endurcissement du corps
Exercice d'endurcissement de l'esprit
Exercice de mendicité
Exercice de cécité et de surdité
Exercice de jeûne
Exercice de cruauté

It's a relief to read such decisive coverage of the human condition. Talk about home schooling. This is self-schooling in a totalitarian state, a state of incomprehension. Claus and Lucas, whose names are renditions of each other, are relentless in their push for the evenness of truth, all of which they record in the eponymous grand cahier. Their identity shifts but not their absolute loneliness or their absolute devotion to each successive situation in which they find themselves. In your own grand cahier you do not have to tell the truth, though that might be your avowed intent; in fact, by definition, you're already lying.

These are some other chapter headings.

L'hiver
Le chantage
Notre premier spectacle
En prison
La fuite
L'incendie
La séparation

The twins have a scrupulous ethical position at all times. Frightening as other autonomous children in literature, they're more more stark than enfants terribles, they have less style, more brink, more chill. Language always stops short. Scene after scene, no comment, no feeling. We are suddenly dependent on feeling now that it's not there, now that it is an indulgence no one can afford.

Volume 2, L'épreuve, is more episodic. Tales are told. People arrive and then disappear. Just as the reader starts to know a person or a situation, everything changes, the person disappears, by her own hand or his, the situation changes, everyone is face on to loss which ever way you look. The twins are now in two different unnamed countries. Agota Kristof as she reads is in two different countries, Hungary and Switzerland. As I read I am on the beach in Puerto Banus amid the whine of jet skis and the savour of factor 50; I am in my room at home in County Cork listening to Mozart. You are wherever you are and wherever you were before or would like to be.

By Volume 3, Le troisième mensonge, the third lie, the narrative is fractal, as it has to be in a totalitarian state. Through the eyes of characters we think are the ones we've known all along, we see earlier versions: the child who lives with his grandmother at the edge of town, and plays harmonica in cafés; the deaf boy; the limping boy; the boy whose father or whose mother is dead, perhaps. Handsome boy, handsome girl, similar age, half sister or no relation. Every relationship is there to be fractured—by death, by accident, murder, suicide, escape.

The twins of Volume 1 are not united in Volume 3, we're not in the realm of satisfactory endings. Claus is now Klaus, and orthographically no longer inside the spelling of Lucas. There may not have been any twins in the first place, they were a fable, the two sides of a thwarted intimacy. It doesn't read like a tease of our expectations, it reads like mortal confusion, irresolvable loss, of identity, family and future.

Strong stuff for the beach. My ethical position, reading Agota Kristof on the beach, is clear: leave me be, leave me to think to the sound of the sea and then turn over. Almost total detachment from where I am, but hardly escapist.

Lorrie Moore & Clarice Lispector

By the serendipity of New York Review of Books advertising, I buy Clarice Lispector The Chandelier and Lorrie Moore See What Can Be Done at the same time and find that Lorrie has a piece about Clarice. Lorrie, in her merry American way, cannot get to Clarice at all. She makes light and looks for a quick touch.

Before beginning this review, I took a quick, unscientific survey: Who has read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them), they grew breathless in their praise.

Clarice is a dangerous European in South America, born in Ukraine and moved to northeastern Brazil when she was five. Europeans have intensity and innerness; South America is all mountainy renegades. The combination is deadly. Clarice's quirky Portuguese, like Beckett's quirky French, is more potent than your humorous professional journalist wants to be seen to take on board in North America. 

Lispector's uncategorizable work causes the reader to mimic her own processes: that is, her sentences are often in search of themselves and are constructed from the very casting about that a reader may undergo in having to find a term that is suitable to describe them.

Three cheers for every exploded category, three billion cheers and plenty casting about.

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

By the end of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter I don't want to leave this place, these people, their language, behind. I don't do this often with books. I don't immerse in character and plot. But this is more like group loneliness, and I feel like circling that for ever. With seven pages to go, to soften the desolation—or deepen it— I begin the new translation of The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector, first published only three years after The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in 1946.

In the weekend Irish Times there's a column in praise of older books, but they don't go beyond the 1980s or 90s. I go back to the era of my parents' or my teachers'  youth, somewhere safe that I don't know, but do. Clarice Lispector is so unsafe she's safe (as houses). Reading her is like crossing a fast-flowing stream on stepping stones and now and then getting soaked. Exhilarating. Breathtaking. Uncomfortable. When will I next get wet?

Her life was painstaking but at the same time she was living just a single streak sketched without strength and without end, flat and terrified like the trace of another life; and the most she could do was cautiously follow her glimpses of it.

I seek in my reading the version of myself I haven't been able to write, or have written but can't read.  Clarice Lispector wrote this when she was twenty-three; my patois at twenty-three was less certain in its obscurity, the prose more purple. That's why you read your kin, to find their different clarity and then your own in the new context of many years later.

...changing with care the way she lived. The things that would inspire her were so brief. Vaguely, vaguely, if she'd been born, plunged her hands in the water and died, she'd exhaust her strength and her forward movement would have been complete...

And here is Carson McCullers' Mick Kelly age thirteen and three-quarters, seven pages from the end of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

What good was it? That was the question she would like to know. What the hell good it was. All the plans she had made, and the music. When all that came of it was this trap — the store, then home to sleep, and back at the store again.

We read to situate ourselves anew.

Mick raked her hair from her forehead. Her mouth was open so that her cheeks seemed hollow. There were these two things she could never believe. That Mister Singer had killed himself and was dead. And that she was grown and had to work at Woolworth's.

I am grown and have astonishing freedom. I did not have to work at Woolworth's. I taught french literature and literature as a foreign language, I cultivated my garden.

Carson McCullers, The heart is a Lonely Hunter

I inscribed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter with my name and Christmas, 1964. Have I read it since? Have I needed this girl/boy child in the 1940s who, in her sharp, hot, aching small town in the deep South, finds Motsart?

There was one special fellow's music was like little coloured pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

Mick Kelly, the girl/boy child, kin of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, hears Mozart a few times, in her mind she could remember about six different tunes from the pieces of his she had heard.

But they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time.

A few days ago we spent a few hours with Anthony Mackey, in Waterford, his town. He made art about where he came from. Like Carson McCullers, he grew up local, he knows what community is, can't understand what it is not to have one.

Among the complex reasons why I choose to read this rather than that, why Carson McCullers, has to be Mackey in Waterford, Lookit, he says often, and you don't say that if you don't come from somewhere.