Borges

I first read Borges' stories fifty years ago, slowly, one at a time, stopping so as to have more to read. Another one tomorrow. Savouring your goodies, your fictions, tales he has made, fashioned, fabricated, woven, in the manner of life, history and matters of fact, affairs of the mind and the book. Borges was a portal. I have lived there ever since.

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek, and where leprosy is infrequent.

I read Borges in my early twenties. I was the grey man from the South, the bamboo canoe and the unanimous night. I wrote the Zend language, I lived in the circular ruins. I dreamed and was dreamed. 

At first his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheatre .... clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of the seats.  .... Asleep or awake, the man thought over the angers of this phantoms, ... He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

Worthy of participating in the universe. If you value the universe. The grey man dreamed a man — I was not, am not, bothered it was a man, not a woman or any other combination—dreamed with misgivings—without birds, in sheets of flame—every dream ends abruptly. He dreamed a man limb by limb, a man capable of walking thought fire without being burned.

For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labours. .... With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone was dreaming him.

PONDWORKS 2023

I was up at the pond today as soon as I saw a sunny period unfold from the northwest. Two sunny periods, in fact, separated by slow-moving cloud, in which I wrote up two complex dreams in my diary, read the surface of the water, dragonfly reflections and water skaters, plus a story by Cynthia Ozick, The French Doll, in the New Yorker, a review of the film Oppenheimer and an article about Ultra Processed Food and how Nestlé sent a boat down the Amazon to bring junk food to indigenous children who then developed diet-related diabetes as well as more lethal covid; and closed my eyes, lay flat on my back. The sun was out again. The heating was on.  

POCKETBOOK SUMMER EDITORIAL, 2023

A July New Yorker piece called Tell No Tales offered the case for stories and the case for the dark matter that makes up so much of life, swarm not story, frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments Elena Ferrante called it. All the carrying that stories do, whether to satisfy the sense of belonging to a culture, staving off death, like Scheherazade, or simply putting a shape on the magma for a while, if not a a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time, as Lorrie Moore said.

August is a good month for reading, and slipping off into thinking about it, thinking out from it, engrossed for a short time, numbed, and then, back to the place in which you read, the pillow as it often is, or staring into the view out of the window, the shaping to be done out there, the sycamore basal growth trimmed, the euphorbia dead bits cut off, the state of compost heaps, frantumaglia of the garden.

I have been reading William Morris again, and his ancient forebears, Plutarch etc, browsing the Faber Book of Utopias from the front and from the back.  

Then he sat down beside me and said he'd been spending the morning wrestling with the problem of speaking the truth in books; so I said, haven't you always spoken it? because that seemed to me the chief point of M's books. But he said, not much, because most of it was quite unspeakable in our world, as we found it too shocking and humiliating.

Aldous Huxley in 1930, a long short story called 'After the Fireworks'. 

Clarice Lispector, in Agua Viva, 1973, does not need the word for truth.

This is not a story because I don't know any stories like this but all I know how to do is go along saying and doing: it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train. 

Clarice Lispector is a continuum under my reading. Like Virginia Woolf. Like thinning out young turnips, leaving the spare seedlings beside the row. As all our fellow-travellers go too far sometimes, it is by this excess we find ourselves.

I read Aldous Huxley because I saw a lad called Florian in Sneem with a copy of Island in his hand, which he'd got from the village book box, read, then  gave to a young Portuguese woman working in the hotel for the summer. We talked for a while about utopia and dystopia. I have never been tempted to reread Aldous Huxley: something pinched and fussy, his language reflecting the machines he feared. Always harping on humiliation. Some other story there. 

Circus Train by Joan Selby-Lowndes

Gertie gave me Circus Train by Joan Selby-Lowndes for Christmas, 1958. I wrote my name on the flyleaf. I was impressed someone had thought about me enough to choose this, and read with respect and eagerness the story of running away to sea and then travelling with the circus, being chinese and having acrobatics bred into you, the fluidity and the stillness. From very young they can all hold and then flip their bodies with grace, it's natural, it's a way of dealing with world wars and starvation. Balance and interdependence. Onwardness and otherness. Encountering that at age eleven was electric.

Joan Selby-Lowndes has little online life except for several portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. Her writing too, is pre-motor car. She could have trusted more the tale recounted live to her. Kai Yong from China, who went to sea, then learned how to spin plates, entered the circus life, married Joanna from Germany, and had children who later formed a troupe of artistes, the Yong Sisters and Brothers, spanning China, Germany, France, England, America. There were long separations, deep privations. Joan Selby-Lowndes filled in the history around the tale of Kai Yong and his family like blue poster paint for the sky and black for world wars. 

 

The Greek Sources

My friend Noreen back in the day liked to get up at six, have a glass of grape juice and check the Greek sources. She said it with intensity and conviction. I felt excluded but pleased. That anyone should do this, say this.

Reading bits of Plutarch in the early evening recalls Noreen. I start to know what a source might be. The speech of a society two thousand years ago. In the infancy of looking at yourself. Plutarch's Lives are Parallel Lives. Greece and Rome. The glory that was Greece, the splendour that was Rome. I read all of the life of Lycurgus and the beginning of Demetrius. Simple moral certitudes which don't follow through any more. 

I read the beginning of the life of Demetrius, only because my boyfriend was Demetrius in the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (I was Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, my brother was Puck). The art of medicine, the art of music, must consider disease and noise. 

These arts below no praise on that innocence which boasts an entire ignorance of vice. In their reckoning, it is rather an absurd simplicity to be ignorant of these things, which every man that is disposed to live virtuously should make it his particular care to know.

I get up at eight, after mint tea, and check the Inniscarra sources. 

One of the big aspens fell up at the pond though there was little wind, knocking into a myrtle and a smaller aspen, happily missing the eucryphia and the snowdrop tree. The builders, Finbarr, Mick, Will and Nathan from Normandy, plus Ambrose, heritage joiner, occasionally, are renewing the new room twenty-seven years on. And the greenhouse. Talk runs around lead troughs and glazing bars. I spray the dust off the tomatoes after they've gone. 

Plutarch's Lives — Lycurgus

'Of Lycurgus, the lawgiver, we have nothing to relate that is certain and uncontroverted', wrote Plutarch two thousand years ago. My edition of Plutarch, marbled and leather-bound, translated by the Langhorne brothers in England in the eighteenth century, has a simplicity, a clarity born, perhaps of something similar to a novelist's wishful thinking. Lycurgus was a designer of ancient Sparta. The education of youth was the greatest and most glorious work of a lawgiver, he said. He went to strenuous lengths.

A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus was a new division of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality, the city overcharged with many indigent persons who had no land, and the wealth centred in the hands of the few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state still more inveterate and fatal—I mean poverty and riches—he persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land and to make new ones, in such manner that they might be perfectly equal in their possessions and way of living. 

In the late nineteenth century, William Morris read Plutarch. News From Nowhere is saturated with  ancient greece. In the early twenty-first century, where News From Nowhere was set, where we now are, stressing and steaming in late capitalism when William Morris had us bucolic along the river by now, gathering for haymaking with comely folk in well-wrought clothes, having done away with money and politics.

Lycurgus minted iron money and luxury died away of itself, replaced by simple food and lots of exercise. No unnecessary production. Joy in workmanship. Les arts décoratifs. Healthy activity in leisure time. Reading and conversation. Common sense in 1930s Europe. Lycurgus as written by Plutarch, translated in the late eighteenth century, read by William Morris in the late nineteenth century, feeds into my history. As well as a child of Hitler I am a child of common sense. 

It was not, however, the principal design of Lycurgus that this city should govern others, but he considered its happiness, like that of a private man, as flowing from virtue and self-consistency; he therefore so ordered and disposed it, that by the freedom and sobriety of its inhabitants, and their having a sufficiency within themselves, its continuance might be the more secure.

Agua Viva: Taylor Swift, Natalia Ginzburg, Clarice Lispector

This week I read a piece in the New Yorker about a Taylor Swift concert in a football stadium and how each of the audience felt she was personally in touch with their lives, each with her twinkling bracelet, her individual sparkle that came with the entrance ticket. 

I started Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Agua Viva as Bob Dylan read Rimbaud's Illuminations. One hundred and eleven times. Though Bob Dylan probably wasn't counting.

Agua Viva sounds like lively water, living water, water of life. In Brazil agua viva first of all means jellyfish. Jelly is the living agua in the water, less a fish than a shape to catch the light. And this is what Clarice Lispector wanted to capture. Her word, I think. To capture the present. She worked on Agua Viva for several years, under different titles (Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life and Loud Object) trying to get her writing in step with her life. Proceeding by accretion, boredom, urgency. breathing. 

Jellyfish are one of the fastest-growing species left to us, multiplied by our pillage and pollution of the waters around us, from which we once crawled. Jellyfish have few predators left. We have eaten them all.

Inside Outside

On Sunday morning, at the little church in Sneem, the day after the launch of our video, five people came into the church, a husband and wife, her brother and a small woman. The funeral of a son had been held there some years before. He was twenty-nine. One or two of them were bikers. There was conversation around Royal Enfield Bullets and Interceptors. We encouraged them to sit down and watch Inside  Outside, with music from La Traviata. They sat quiet, absorbing the filling and pausing of the purple net curtain, the doom and despair of Alfredo and Violetta. It's peaceful, said the small woman. Purple is a good colour for communication. Soul to soul, she meant. All of them.

A pile of books

I dreamed someone gave me a pile of books I would want to read but would not find so easily, he said, he knew how to choose for me because he had read my books, this forceful spectral reader I know so well. I looked at the pile of books and they were so right. He was right, I would not find these books otherwise. The books were right. How did I know, looking up and down the spines? Like going to a discerning bookshop every five years, lustral, you read the bookshop as you go, pausing with certitude on some half-familiar writer, moving on, kneeling down, climbing the bookshop ladder, leaving your bag on the armchair. 

All this was at my elbow without leaving my room. Suddenly the other night.

Valentino, 62 pages by Natalia Ginzburg

Up at the pond I read the whole of Valentino, by Natalia Ginzburg, 62 pages of bare story on the edge of an Italian city in the middle of the twentieth century. The story feels bare, in the sense of relentless yet gentle. People are evenly presented, in a narrative without judgement but not without feeling. At the end you feel as much for all of them, even the feckless eponymous Valentino, who was meant, his parents thought, to become a man of consequence, a doctor who would discover things and be remembered. As it was, after a flurry of schoolgirls, he marries a rich unattractive woman and has three children with her. 

His sister Caterina, our narrator, goes to live in this ménage. Her room has a pale blue carpet. She is even-handed, a schoolteacher, modest, going along with love and death enacted by others, liking the idea of sharing in the lives of others, patient as regards her own, accepting of what happens. She might marry her sister-in-law's cousin, they have an agreeable day out in the country, he drove, he wore Valentino's gloves, a woman threw a shoe at them, they ate tiny pears. A few weeks later he says he can't marry her after all, and within the year he has killed himself. His room is filled with pictures of Valentino.

Like the films of same era, it only takes a pair of gloves and a few small pears. Drawers full of letters. Walls full of pictures.      

Henry James, The Europeans

Eugenia and Felix are the eponymous europeans in Henry James' novel, siblings born in France and Vienna, but Americans, nonetheless. Europe is a dangerous spice. Eugenia and Felix stir things up when they go to visit their American cousins, Charlotte, Gertrude and Clifford in New England at the beginning of the twentieth century..

Henry James liked to deal with the crème de la leisurely crème, in New England, whence he came, or Old England, which he occupied for many years in his comfortable observer role. 

Comfortable observer is no longer comfortable.  I read Henry James when I want to be in observer mode. With pleasure and unease. As if I'm being judged by a clamorous generation in its thereness, nowness, and grievance.

Plot

I read L P. Hartley's A Perfect Woman, without any notion, or concern, along the way, about which of his female characters was building most towards perfection. As well as a certain impatience with all this plotting, this godlike holding in reserve. Resolution is a decoy. My students sometimes thought that the kind of strange literature I wanted them to read had an answer that I was withholding. It must have seemed like obstinacy on my part. But actually it was desire for them to participate.

The veg plot will tell you that. A veg plot is a patch of land you have to dig and tend in order to know. Not a complot, nor a narrative, not a story but the ground of all stories. Mythic if you like. Aristotle thought that plot was myth, and he was half-right. Aristotle needed to do more gardening.

In The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley was passionate as a shy man is; he knew it from inside. You can be passionate about uncertainty when you are twelve. It doesn't read so well in A Perfect Woman.  Uncertainty is now plot. Earning laurels as a novelist. Keeping yourself and others in suspense.

L.P. Hartley should have done more gardening too. In Losey/Pinter's film of The Go-Between, Michael Redgrave as Leo aged sixty, revisits the scene of his adolescence at Brandham Hall. He is dry, detached and sad in a gentlemanly way. This is far more garden patch, veg plot than complot, plan or conspiracy. This is the old terroir, and terror, of his very being. 

When I read about Alexander Goodrich the novelist in A Perfect Woman, I see an upbeat version of Michael Redgrave in his latter years, as novelist, detached, spinning plots that represent him more or less. I find novels uncomfortable. I don't want to have done with a book. I want to want to start reading it again. 

The Go-Between, LP Hartley

This time reading The Go-Between it was the knowledge of the 12 year-old narrator that struck me: he knew french, he knew the zodiac, he had some spells up his sleeve, he had absorbed the Rather Wrong and the Very Wrong, from his mother and his school. He was, by today's lights, a learned child. Sensitive to what was correct. Fatherless. Nothing so fearful as a fatherless child. 

Leo's passage to knowledge left him scarred. He witnessed Very Wrong in the outhouse. The landed beauty, Marian Maudsley, and the tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. Two bodies moving like one. He was dragged to the scene by Marian's mother, intent as she was on a match between Marian and Lord Trimingham.

I think I was more mystified than horrified; it was Mrs Maudsley's repeated screams that frightened me, and a shadow on the wall that opened and closed like an umbrella

L.P. Hartley wrote The Go-Between out of his own needs and memories, a painful crooked truth he could only tell this way. Leo's breakdown happened on his 13th birthday.

During my breakdown I was like a train going through a series of tunnels, sometimes in the daylight, sometimes in the dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing. Little by little the periods of daylight grew more continuous and at last I was running in the open; by the middle of September I was considered fit to go back to school.

After The Go-Between I started A Perfect Woman, also by L.P. Hartley, something to read at night or up at the pond. A lesser book, a pot-boiler perhaps. But I enjoy this grown-up Leo, L.P. Hartley, taking on suburban England: an accountant and his wife and their two tidy children, Jeremy and Janice, who play at farmer and trespasser in the back garden. Trespass: Rather Wrong. The accountant's wife, Isabel, is up against Irma, the Austrian barmaid. 1950s repression its painful. 

Here on the hill in Inniscarra, the weather is as hot as it was in Norfolk where Leo was checking the temperature daily. He sometimes met Mr Maudsley there. They would converse about expected temperatures. If you wanted to know about things like spooning, you asked Ted Burgess That was not what Ted and Marian were doing. It couldn't be. Spooning was not intrinsically Very Wrong. And yet it was.

.... the tidings of Ted's suicide came to me voicelessly, like a communication in a dream.

His fate I did know, and it was for him I grieved. He haunted me. Not only in the most dreadful way, by his blood and brains stuck to the kitchen walls, but by a persistent picture of him cleaning his gun. The idea that he had cleaned it to shoot himself with was a special torment to me; of all the thoughts he might have had while cleaning it, the thought that he was going to use it against himself must have been the one furthest from his mind. The irony of this was like an arrow to my spirit.

Unfair reading

I went up to the pond on yet another clear sunny day with a book that P bought recently, a writer on writing, and one of Maurice Scully's vols of poetry. The writer on writing I'd never heard of, Amina Memory Cain. Maurice Scully I knew for maybe twenty-five years. He died earlier this year, so I have been reading him again to find him on the page. Amina Cain has read a number of writers I have read and liked, but I could not find any echoes of their power or indeed any echoes of anything much. My reading started picking up the kind of speed that bespeaks giving up. 

I turned to Maurice Scully's Tig, which means house in irish. And in that house, the pages of that house, I splashed about. The less there is on the page the more gymnastic the reader. Making shapes out of what isn't there. Making games of what is there. Household games. Games of where you are right now.

it's a game in hide & seek/or dip & pursuit/quite formal/ too /  see/saw

The best I could find in Amina Cain is that she had a cat called Trout, as we did also. 

We have complex patterns of affiliation. This much I understand.

Etel Adnan (1925 - 2021} ( Lebanon, Paris, California) explored the same zone. She sat in Paris cafés and kept reflecting, pushing here and there. She wrote and painted and corresponded. 'Her childhood in Lebanon had been so fractured that there was no single audience, no way of communicating fluently, freely.' (NYRB, 'A Life of Sheer Will', Yasmine El Rashidi), and when she went back there in later life she felt exiled from her exile.

I am always away from something and somewhere. My senses left me one by one to have a life of their own. If you meet me in the street, don't be sure it is me.

I'm sure it's her on the page. As Maurice Scully is there on his pages, wanting to exchange his days for ours, and ours for his.

There are prodigious absences on his pages, on hers. These are the places that the reader resides. In the white around the black of the letters. 

The morning after/my death / we will sit in cafés/  but I will not / be there / I will not be.

Reading the beach

The day I go to the beach without a book is the day I read the shallows. After all the dogs and most of the people have gone home for lunch, we move down from our grassy spot onto the beach. P goes off to look for a stick and I stare into the shallows, prop my feet up on the awkward yellow stones. There are spectral young shrimp or prawn amid new growth seaweed. It's a rough stone beach you have to clamber as much as walk. The best is propped up on a rock staring into shallow water.

Do I read a beach near Kilmacaloge as Fleur Jaeggy, as Ingeborg Bachmann? They are company, for sure. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, suite et fin + Fleur Jaeggy

Ingeborg Bachmann leaves a reader uneasy, unended, upended, suspended. I didn't want to get to the end and I did, early this morning. Almost immediately the question is what to read next. Fleur Jaeggy was Ingeborg's friend. They spent time together. I'll re-read Brother of XX. 

Fleur Jaeggy leaves you frozen. She is Swiss. But relieved. She writes these short, fleshless pieces and then she is relieved. For now. 

Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile. I imagined a longevity without death, a house in the country, a wall. I described to her the external architecture and I bound her with a rope. And a garden within the walls and again I said to her the two of us. I was terribly convinced. A headstrong conviction about what doesn't come true.

Up at the pond, Fleur Jaeggy reads as a substrate of pond life. Pond skaters on the surface tension, caddis fly larvae in their pine needle cigars, tadpoles with spectral legs, dust of millions. The dancing flies are dancing low over the water today. You can't follow any one of them for more than about five seconds. 

On the 31st July, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveromo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo  further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty. Our first pot of tea was disgusting. 

Ingeborg Bachmann, continued

I read Part Two of Malina with bated breath. This was the hinterland of a woman and her father, every page or two a new, sharper, worse image to absorb. I read a few pages at a time. Homeopathic treatment in the middle of the night. Treat like with like. Father with Mother. War with Peace. Everywhere with Nowhere. 

Ingeborg Bachmann asks a lot of her words, her sentences, her readers. We have to be ready for her dreams. For her father. 

Malina shall know everything. But I decide: they shall be the dreams of this night.

 Part Two of Malina reads like a long night of the soul, born in Carinthia, raised in Vienna, shifted to Italy, smouldered and expired there. 

Suddenly, atop a polar summit from which there's no return, I am able to shout: a book about Hell. A book about Hell!

Rachel Kushner in her introduction says:

Once you're in, you're in. You're not decoding. Towards the end you're racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator's thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent—and I mean it would be a real burden to be that mentally acute, it can't go well for a person to know that much  ...

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I had a system to induce sleep. When I shut my eyes there was an afterimage, often black and white, jagged in a fifties way, which was War. If I was to get to sleep I had to replace War with Cream, which was silky and slow.   

Part Three I read up at the pond on a sunny, unslept, afternoon. I paid great attention to the tadpoles, fishing out one or two in my palm to see the tiny legs emerging. Part Three, back in daily life with Malina, who is particular about how his egg is cooked for breakfast, concludes that she was murdered by her father, in a manner of speaking. Whether or not she told Malina is irrelevant.

I like books that I can inhabit, without judgement or comparison. This is my society, my hinterland.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

I came to Ingeborg Bachmann through reading Fleur Jaeggy. 

On the 31st of July, 1971, we left Rome by car, an Alfa Romeo 2600, for Poveremo-Forte dei Marmi. Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps. It seemed like a great voyage, with Poveremo further away than Vienna and Klagenfurt, where we had already been. But now we were to spend a month together. Already that could be a mental voyage: cohabitation, prefiguring. The house we had rented was vast, with a garden. But the water was salty.

Though we cannot know what it is to be a bat, as Thomas Nagel said, we can imagine what it is to be part of a culture, the two of them meshed in the Italian afternoon, with the rest of Europe behind them. Ingeborg and Fleur in Liguria. But the water was salty. Tilda Swinton striding through as Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Jacob Taubes in Vienna, sucking on his pipe, his philosophies. Me in Paris, in 1968, learning how to yearn in french.

On page 40 of Malina, there is a piece of young writing ecstasy.

A storm of words starts in my head, then an incandescence, a few syllables begin to glow, and brightly coloured commas fly out of all the dependent clauses and the periods which were once black have swollen into balloons and float up to my cranium, for everything will be like EXULTATE JUBILATE in that glorious book

One night in Paris, May, 1968, I got up in the middle of the night, washed, dressed, put on earrings, got out my diary and wrote six or seven visionary pages.

That night I knew what it was to be Ingeborg Bachmann, though at the time I did not know of her existence. 

Literary Taste and how to form it, Arnold Bennett at Blarney Car Boot Sale

After walking up and down a few rows at the car boot sale at Blarney GAA grounds, this May Day morning, already in a stupor of looking, I decided on a plan. I would find a book and go home and read it, preferably up at the pond. 

I could have bought Beach Reading, Sport, True Crime or Sebastian Barry. A Farmers Journal from 1965.  Literary Taste And How To Form It, With Detailed Instructions For Collecting A Complete Library Of English Literature, by Arnold Bennett. This was the only real possibility by halftime.

It's exhausting isn't it, I said to our neighbour in the clubhouse, tea and a fairy cake, a ham sandwich, strip lighting, photos of the teams. You'd need it, we agreed. There's more than buying and selling going on here. There's wholesale extrusion of lives, coins, ashtrays, 40-pack toilet paper, set of ware two euros, a lawnmower to try out, record player to play. A rusty saw, Pointless. Must be art. A boy with a blue trumpet blasting his way down the rows. Plates of chips slathered in ketchup and mayonnaise, A plastic dog rotating, a joyless buzz of pink on damp grass. Oil painting with a hole in it, of two apples. Now at our kitchen table.

Dandelions Kawabata

 I'd forgotten April could run as deep as this, in an easterly that picks up in the afternoon, so the first attempt at reading up at the pond — Kawabata's Dandelions — was an uncertain affair. I saw two whirligig beetles. Pete is cutting paths in the woodland. The meadow hardly needs a path. Yellow rattle is established more and more.

We're struggling with our stewardship in the season of dandelions. Trying to fix roofs and making mistakes. Living with them. The roofs and the mistakes. Rough and Roof are kissing cousins. 

Kawabata's dandelions grow around the Ikuta Institute where Ineko has been committed. As her mother and her fiancé leave the Institute, they are told that when they hear the 3 o'clock bell Ineko will be ringing it and that they'll hear her through the bell.

Her fiancé and her mother discuss her case. They are staying nearby in an old inn, in the season of dandelions. They have heard that dandelions open in the sunlight and close at night, but they aren't sure that's the case. 

It is. 

Ineko's illness, somagnosia, is the centre of Dandelions, plays out off-stage, acknowledged by a temple bell. The novel wasn't finished, or has no finish. Two people are talking about the condition of a third, Ineko, who plays ping pong and sometimes loses sight of the ball, makes love with her fiancé and sometimes loses sight of his body. 

This is a time to read books that have no centre of gravity.

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

A hundred and forty pages into Paul Bowles'  The Sheltering Sky, Port Moresby — his name takes a long time to say — is taken to the best place in Aïn Krorfa, a village — wrong word — in southern Algeria, where he and his wife Kit would stay a few days. 

If in doubt go south. There's always doubt.

There's a blind dancer at the café that night, a woman of perfect proportions, supremely impersonal. 

A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.

Port Moresby is an American going south in the Sahara after the war, with Kit and their many valises, her lizard-skin shoes, evening gowns, her Helena Rubinstein. Their relationship with luggage under the sheltering sky is the basso continuo of this tale. Under the sheltering sky there are patches of fur in the rabbit stew and other nightmares. Mosquitoes and flayed babies. 

I know, said Port absently, 'I hate it as much as you.'

'No, you don't. But I think you would if you didn't have me along to do your suffering for you.

They went to North Africa after World War Two, from New York. This is what restless existentials were doing around the time I was born. I liked deserts as soon as I was in one. The emptiness, the expanse, the sky, the music, languages I didn't understand, the silence, real and imagined. 

For many years I confused The Sheltering Sky with Reach For the Sky by Paul Brickhill, he of the great escape and the dam busters. Port Moresby is named for the capital of Papua, New Guinea, a creature of the existential era, fellow of Camus and Sartre, sentient in a pool of inertia and restlessness after the Second World War, an American in Africa, horrified by cockroaches and filth, pressing on into the desert. 

'You know, said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, 'the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind.'

Kit shuddered slightly as she said: 'From what's behind?'

'Yes.'

'But what is behind?' Her voice was very small.

'Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.'

 In absolute night, eventually everything would happen. Port would die of typhoid fever, slowly, on the floor of a room in a fort. Kit would lock him in, to die his own death, and she'd go south into the desert she feared, with all kinds of adventures with natives, as she and Port called them, as if she were appeasing his death, or her own.

Weights and Measures, Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth's novels happen on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where people live by accident, almost; they hadn't meant to come here, or were on their way somewhere else. In Weights and Measures, Anselm Eibenschütz, formerly of the eleventh artillery regiment, is sent to a small municipality next to the Russian border as Inspector of Weights and Measures. He wanted to stay in the army but his wife, also accidental, wouldn't hear of it. 

The Inspector spends much of his time in a border tavern frequented by vagrants, thieves and Russian deserters who drink mead and 99% schnapps, which is illegal, and eat sausage, horseradish and plates of salted peas, occasionally bursting into songs that, far from celebrating their new freedom, bewail instead their lost country, as they drink themselves into a stupor. 'Ja lubyl tibia', is their favourite. 

I googled the song and found a rendition by Alexandra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEZ3WCYCxCc. Here, suddenly, was the music, the hopelessness and diffuse yearning of my forbears, I recognised all the shifts in pace, the scoops of emotion; the border country of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was pulled back from its remoteness into my rarely revived sense of origin. 

I read most of the book in a single day, in refuge from bad weather and insomnia, sinking slowly with Anselm Eibenschütz into the decay of his marriage, the vanity of his job, his infatuation with Euphemia, the gypsy girl, his decline into drink and eventual death.

Joseph Roth died of drink, in Paris, in his forties. He writes with a warm cynicism. Of the origins of the wiliest character in the story, Leibusch Jadlowker, owner of the border tavern, he says:

Rumour had it that Jadlowker had fled from Odessa because he had slain a man with a sugar-loaf. As a matter of fact it was hardly a rumour, it was almost a truth.

This is where a life is lived, between rumour and truth, in countries whose borders are permanently in a state of deliquescence. Anselm Eibenschütz wishes he'd never left the cavalry. The order of the army is such that one doesn't have to face the central void. Whereas the Inspector of Weights and Measures constantly faces the fact that no one's weights and measures are correct. The central void is everywhere.

Affinities, Brian Dillon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

 I finished Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays, on the last day of our holiday in Portugal, and was left wondering how she gave us a sense of intimacy with these people, and the war, and the land, without ever seeming to dwell long enough for us to know them, the people, the war, and the land. Yet there is an insistence, as people appear and disappear, marry unsuitably or oddly or not at all, grow old or die or think about how dying would be all right if it happened. We don't need to be told what people's feelings are because the onwardness of events takes the place of individuals and the feelings they might have. Or feelings are not the point. Onwardness, history, the interleaving of people, not even families particularly, any mesh of friends, neighbours, acquaintances. There's a coolness, distance, a looking outward at the broad flow of events, marriage, a baby here or there. Writing is a way of keeping going, not involving, urged by detail, little teeth like a wolf, a mother who works in a cake shop, or arrives from foreign parts with chocolates, goes away to school.

The quietly main character, Anna, becomes pregnant at 16, and marries an older man, a friend of her father's, who tells her a number of times, as most descriptive things like the little teeth of a wolf or a crooked smile or hair like chicken feathers, are said a number of times, that she is an insect and he just a big leaf on which she rests. He hoped she would become a strong woman but she was still an insect who didn't know how to do anything except perch on a big leaf. He is killed at the end of the book, at the end of the war, by the Germans. So, her big leaf gone, with one of her brothers and one of the family from across the road, she considers the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and the long difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.

The chapter when Anna is dealing with, or ignoring, the fact that she is pregnant, about halfway through the book, is one of the few internal moments.

She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution.

The internal shifts quickly to the external. From the baby inside her to the revolution she might start. This is how we determine what is important. Abruptly. At times you'd least expect.

Our holiday went into a third week because we missed the plane home. There was a strike at the airport. The next day I started reading Natalia Ginzburg again, at first just sentences or paragraphs here and there, then outright I was reading the whole of the second half again, unwilling to leave these people behind, finding the emphases with pleasure, the insect face, the crooked smile and the little wolf teeth, threading the book like pearls.

READING AS WAITING

Two books, by Natalia Ginzburg and Brian Dillon, sit untouched on the windowsill downstairs. I bought them for our trip to Portugal and have kept them unopened. Meanwhile, a Raymond Chandler story, Goldfish, a few (unsatisfying) stories by Graham Swift. Most compelling might be the Rough Guide to Portugal, well out of date by now, but full of the charms of the partially unknown: town squares we'll sit in and vistas we'll absorb from hilltops and balconies. 

Graham Swift's Learning to Swim & Other Stories must have been the follow-up to Waterland, which I liked back then for its wet fenland intrigue. These days, his language seems flat and over-expansive. The undertow is on view. There's a completion I don't want and often don't wait for.

'Goldfish' I read by the stove upstairs, published for the 60th anniversary of Penguin, 60p for 60 pages, written by Chandler whose work is so filmed that his words leap off the page and into the stance of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, words for actions, and then the laconic pause that marks the end of one story and the start of another.

Natalia Ginzburg, whom I have been reading on and off for the last number of years, has no completion. You get in, stay a while and get off at what might be the stop at which you began your trip, yet you have travelled a long way to get here.

Brian Dillon's new book Affinities I imagine reading in the Hotel de Moura, a blue and white convent at the foot of the Great Lake; then later in front of the Forte de Sao Joao da Barra in southeastern Portugal, lying on a sandbank, facing south.

TROPISMES

Tropismes by Nathalie Sarraute has been on the floor near the stove for some months. I read one or two, puzzled, my knowledge of the french language functional but unhelpful. I read in the passing way of the insomniac, uncomprehending and and sometimes content, sometimes irrritated. Then, one evening, I read one or two pieces and recognise something. Clic. Déclic. Myself, namely. The rage—or is it relief?—of Caliban seeing himself in the mirror. 

Nathalie Sarraute writes in a silence broken by the light scratching of her creatures, nameless and close by at all times. People on the side of themselves. To the side. Recounting the little they can say, she can say, as they grow. It only takes a couple of pages. 

Quand il était petit, la nuit il se dressait sur son lit, il appelait. Elles accouraient, allumaient la lumière, elles prenaient dans leurs mains les linges blancs, les serviettes de toilette, les vêtements, et elles les lui montraient. Il n'y avait rien. Les linges entre leurs mains devenaient figés et morts dans la lumière.

Maintenant qu'il était grand, il les faisait encore venir pour regarder partout, chercher en lui, bien voir et prendre entre leurs mains les peurs blotties en lui dans les recoins et les examiner à la lumière.

I AM WHERE I THINK

"I am where I think." Elif Batuman explains.

Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it: a subject I found myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a garden overlooking Tblisi ...

Elif Batuman is american of turkish origin. She is reading russian literature in 2022 in Ukraine and Georgia. 

Gogol's story 'The Nose', in which a nose detaches from its face and becomes an independent being, takes on a glaring meaning in the context of Putin's Russia. Gogol was from Ukraine but wrote in Russia, in russian. Ukraine is the nose on the face of Russia.

My grandparents came from Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. I grew up in England. I identify with no country, only the patch that I tend and the books I read and write. I live in Ireland, an island at the western extremity of Europe, at the edge of the known world, which spills off the left-hand side of old maps and feeds my innate detachment. 

I read Elif Batuman's article in the bath. Descartes is upended. Afloat. I think therefore I am, becomes, I am where I think.

We need to find new, "contrapuntal ways of reading", she says, and I think of the many tangoes I have experienced reading a couple of books at a time. 

There is no better place than the bath for taking on new ideas.

You are so comfortable they are immediately ideas you've always known.

The Middle Voice by Han Kang

I read The Middle Voice, a story by Han Kang, mostly in the middle of the night, where the middle voice speaks.  The middle voice is a greek third voice, reflexive, as in the english 'he hanged himself'. 

Perhaps insomnia is a method. Learn and suffer are nearly the same in greek. What I read in the middle of the night I read exclusively. Nothing else is going on. The world is mute and you are humming peacefully.

The woman in Han Kang's story has long episodes of being unable to move her lips, speak, She writes. Or someone writes. Her son calls her Thickly Falling Snow's Sorrow. His name is Sparkling Forest. 

A korean woman learns classical greek in order to take refuge in another language. To learn its economies and poignancy. To test her own speech. 

No, she says, it isn't that simple.

VERTICAL READING

Not long after I started a diary, I changed my handwriting to something less schoolgirl, more monk. It made my life feel more vertical, more intense. The onward flow of days was matched by the downward pull of calligraphy. This was where I lived. For sure. 

Casey Cep in The New Yorker reviewed The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, a study of monkish attention in mediaeval times. Their efforts look both 'riotously strange, yet ....  annoyingly familiar'. How far do you have to go to concentrate properly? 

Thirty-five years on top of a pillar. Twenty days without sleeping. Sixty years living next to a river and never once looking at it. 

What does it take and what are we looking for? Something worthy of our attention, somewhere to rest.

SKIMMING

What's wrong with skimming, with being superficial? says Rosalie in Yiyun Li's story, 'Wednesday's Child'?, as she waits for a train in Amsterdam. She has other radical ideas about reading. Couldn't we excise books, like unwanted DNA, she asks. Wanting another opinion, she gave Agota Kristof's Trilogy to her fifteen year-old daughter, Marcie, who soon afterwards walked under a train.

She wished there had been more time for Marcie to skim on the surface of her life. What's wrong with being superficial? With depth always comes pain.

That's why we go on holiday, where the greatest depth you can have is to sit on a rock by the Meeting of the Waters, on a still, quiet day, drinking liquorice tea looking down through the water at coins thrown in for luck or protection, and across the water to the elegant little bridge and the weir we came through with the canoe circa 1992, holding onto a rope to slow our passage through the rushing water. 

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness, absolute stillness is death; and when you're dead you no longer wait for anything.

The day before I read 'Wednesday's Child', I spent an hour or so skimming Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, a slightly fictionalised account of the years spent in mental institutions. Skimming was all I felt like doing that day. I didn't want to go any deeper or take any longer than that. Which is perhaps why Yiyun Li's story made its impact.

JANET FRAME'S CREATURES

The fourth misty day. Reading Janet Frame's stories. How she made short melodies of her childhood stories. Songs in the morning and poems in the afternoon. Naive teaching suits the introspective in the class. Words made music of your awkwardness. Her early stories are tiny sketches of girls with different names but the same, frame, sorry. The story called Dossy stopped me in my insomniac tracks. A story of an imaginary friend, a way-station friend, with whom you can giggle.

The nuns heard someone laughing and they stopped at the gate to see who it was. They say a little girl playing ball by herself on the footpath. It's little Dossy Park, they said. With no mother and living in that poky little house in Hart Street and playing by herself all the time, goodness knows what she'll turn out to be.

 She turned out to be a writer, which she was all along.

Edmund White and Janet Frame: TANGO

When you are confined to quarters in January, even snowed in, nothing better than A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty, by Edmund White, a climate in their own right. 

Like a blind man's hands exploring a face, the memory lingers over an identifying or beloved feature but dismisses the rest as just a curse, a bump, an expanse. Only this feature—these lashes tickling the palm like a firefly or this breath pulsing hot on a knuckle or this vibrating Adam's apple—only this feature seems lovable, sexy. But in writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts. One even composes one's improvisations into a quiet new face never glimpsed before, the likeness of an invention. ....  I say all this by way of hoping that the lies I've made up to get from one poor truth to another may mean something—may even mean something particular to you, my eccentric, patient, scrupulous reader.

I interviewed Edmund White in the 1990s in my office, top floor, number 3 Brighton Villas, on the Western Road. His way of sitting, half-slung and warm, permeates my reading now. A Boy's Own Story has the language of the gods. There's something he needs to create through words that is never quite there when you need it. So you must write.

Because a novel — these words — is a shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at tall requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added.

Last night we watched Jane Campion's An Angel At My Table, from Janet Frame's autobiography. Janet Frame had to write, to keep watch, to touch base, nearly all the time. The world out there, family, friends, society, was not to be trusted. She felt ungainly, unlikely, unlikeable. She had big red hair. An awkward gait. After the death of her father, going through his things, she put on his boots and relived his stance, in low light. Curly, he was called. 

A tango with Edmund White and Janet Frame is the flavour of the week. The strangest tango is the strongest. Edmund White could not keep away from the world. Janet Frame had difficulty being in it.

When I was sixteen, I took out from the library Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame's first novel. In the list at the back of my diary of the books I'd read that year, it came after John Bratby's Breakdown and before Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. That year I read 128 books, though some were followed by NF, for not finished. Owls Do Cry was labelled F, for fair, which meant I didn't get it. John Bratby got A, for awful, and Carlo Levi G for good.

Edmund White said his plots were scrapbooks. Janet Frame might say hers are plucked reconfigurations of the family tapestry. Different names. Different selections. In Owls Do Cry her name is Daphne, her brother is Toby, who takes fits, her sisters Francie and Chicks, their parents Amy and Bob. 

I don't wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an' find things.

The lost lives of tyres and hoovers and books. They'd found Grimm's Fairy Tales the last time. Francie dies in a fire at the dump. Chicks, now Teresa, twenty years later has a house built on the dump. While Daphne spends years in a distant dump of her own, a seacliff of lunatics dressed in red flannel sacks and electro petrified every week or two. 'It's up to you to co-operate and pull yourself together.'

Edmund White, Bunny, Dumpling, so comfortable/pained with where he is, always disarmingly in flood, weaving his own tapestry. And then, back on high ground, the freedom of his (perceived) perversity. If it wasn't perverse he might not feel so free. Edmund Valentine White 111.

READING NOTES HOME AND ABROAD

In northeast London, after reading too much crap, P goes back to Henry James and Joseph Conrad, back to the books he read at college where you had to pay attention to know what was going on. In Brighton, M is reading The Trial and The Waves, in respite from academe and other speaks. In a gallery in Cork, A is reading The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Sightings by Budd Hopkins, under plain cover. In a café in Macroom, a woman is reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is somehow invigorating, especially in January. 

PSYCHOTHERAPY, the diary

Setting up psychotherapy is the hard part, said Rudy Wurlitzer in New York, Easter 1984. He gave me a copy of Alice Miller The Drama of the Gifted Child which I read on the plane home, thinking that if any of it applied to me I'd have a hard time accepting it.

A conversation last week with C sent me back to my diary of 1984/5. She wanted to know was there a moment in psychotherapy when it all came clear, when you thought, that's it, now I see. It's not quite like that. There aren't revelations, or at least you don't know they're revelations until some time afterwards, when you're starting to learn to live with their truth.

After maybe four or five sessions in which I responded to the questions of M the therapist with what seemed even to me to be neat cameos of my life, she said:

What can I ask you that will make you react? I started to go numb, it began in my chest and into my throat. What conditions do you lay down for my having access to you? Tell me three conditions. I stared out of the window at the cement between the ridge tiles on the garage roof. 'That you be interested', I said weakly, 'that you feel for me'. I couldn't think of more, I couldn't think. I was crying. Leave the tears, said M, don't wipe them away.

It was the start of a very long, slow wash, all the atoms of the fabric of me battered and opened. 

Opening up, what do you think of in that phrase? A void, a huge gaping space, a wound, raw open flesh, I replied.

A year of thinking dangerously. Doing M's homework each week. Making bread. Making mud. Seeking shelter. Asking for things. Thinking about punishment. Writing unsent letters to my parents. You could get it from a book, said M, I'm helping you manage the emotions, so that everyday life can continue, teaching, etc. 

Several months later came another moment.

What do you see when you think of yourself as a small child?

A small lump beneath high-tension cables with an electric pole on either side.

The first image that comes to mind is the most accurate. That small lump between electric poles was one I came to know in the way of rare astounding knowledge that shapes a life. I was an image maker by inclination. Sometimes I could see nothing else. I saw my family in a waste land, on waste ground between houses, among those weeds I've always been drawn to. In dreams I was often on see-through bridges, terrified of the fast black river rushing below.

I wrote four volumes of diary a year back then. As a cast of characters and emotions reels through my life and my diary, my neat, monkish handwriting bursts into capitals and different coloured felt tips, with scribbles that evolve, by mid-late 1985, into drawings. For much of of the duration of therapy I'd lost the ability to listen to music. Now my diary was losing its language. I was scribbling in paint.

The words and the music came back. My solitary life became a life in partnership. Many years later I met M by chance in town and told her she'd turned my life around, and she glowed. 

PLAGIARISM: the further reaches

I read Kathy Acker and think of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which I loved in 1978. Reading a few pages brings back all the unsayable,  all the oversaid of that era. Pain can be cloying. These days I am brought to a halt on page 26 by an embedded line of Rilke. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And read no more. In reading Elizabeth Smart I am reading Rilke, Rimbaud, and the Old Testament, to name a few.

Kathy Acker was born a few months after I was. The last section of Tarantula is 'The Story of My Life', September 1973.

1947. I'm born April 18th; my family thinks of itself as aristocratic, though it isn't, since my grandmother (mother's mother) came from Alsace-Lorraine to U.S.A. poor and in her later life married a wealthy man. They properly worship money as do all good Americans. They assure me that only the unworthy work. I will never have to work since I'm rich and will marry rich, that if I ever have to think about money it's because I've come down in the world. They're incredibly stingy with me. These conflicting early trainings make me proud and shy, confident that I'm by nature above other people and aware that everyone, especially my parents, hates me. .... As a baby I spit at whoever I feel like ....

As a writer she spits. She is thrown in prison for trying to figure out her desires. Or is that the Marquis de Sade? She has read Alexander Trocchi, Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love (and, my first cookbook, Around the World in Eighty Dishes) WB Yeats, Dickens.

This is writing through your reading. Kathy Acker has a lot more starting torque than Elizabeth Smart. A lot more hatred.

My mother wanted to make me exactly like her. I look like her; we both have large eyes, same bone structure, thick child's skin, dark brown hair, purple lips. We're fond of our bodies and wilful. From the first day I was born and hypocritically smiling, pretending I was happy, I opposed her: I set myself against her so that I should become someone else. She began outwardly to hate me when I began to menstruate. She wanted me to be nothing, like her.

Her autobiography segues into that of the Marquis de Sade. As, in earlier chapters, she copies events from other writers and in copying becomes their characters. Language creates her, not necessarily her own language. It is compelling to write down the words of others. If by reading you become the characters you're reading about, by copying other writers' words you embody them, inhabit them, and so release yourself from yourself. Which was maybe what she, like many writers, especially poets, was trying to do all along.

WOMEN IN 1944

In 1944 Natalia Ginzburg published an essay about women in the short-lived Italian journal Mercurio. This was recently republished by The New York Review of Books together with a letter from the journal's editor, Alba de Céspedes. These are women of my mother's generation, or a little older, and, while I can more easily read Natalia Ginzburg's novels as independent of era, an essay plants itself in its time, speaks clearly from my mother's generation despite the fact I never heard my mother talk of the position of women, except insofar as she provided a foil, a milder cushion for the views of her friend Gertie, who never married or had children and was vehement on the subject of men.  

The image that dominates Natalia Ginzburg's essay and her friend's response is the well of melancholy into which women fall, which accounts both for their pain and for their complicity.

The truth is two women will understand each other thoroughly when they start to talk about the dark well they fall into, and they can exchange many impressions about wells and the absolute impossibility of communicating with others, of accomplishing something worthwhile, no matter how hard they try, and about the floundering to get back to the surface.

Her friend Alba responds warmly to the essay, but adds a note of disagreement.

But—unlike you—I think these wells are our strength. Because every time we fall into the well we descend to the deepest roots of our being human, and in returning to the surface we carry inside us the kinds of experiences that allow us to understand everything that men—who never fall into the well—will never understand.

The gender porosity of our era may dull the force of their debate. The well is open to all these days. Which is probably a good thing, even if an unwieldy means to achieve the privilege of melancholy.

I would like to speak to you at length about the suffering (women) experience in the well, because all suffering is in a woman's life; but then, to be perfectly honest, I should also talk about the joy they find there. 

But I can't talk to you about that today because I find myself—as is so often the case— in the well.

FACES

After a week of flu and some desultory reading, mostly of New Yorkers and New York Review of Books, I picked up Eudora Welty's stories from the shelves and started from where I'd left a bookmark whenever I last read it, at a story called 'Clytie'. 

Clytie Farr and her brother and sister and bedridden father live in a large house in a very small town called Farr's Gin.

Anyone could have told you that there were not more than 150 people in Farr's Gin, counting Negroes. Yet the number of faces seemed to Clytie almost infinite. She knew now to look slowly and carefully at a face; she was convinced that it was impossible to see it all at once. The first thing she discovered about a face was always that she had never seen it before. When she began to look at people's actual countenances there was no more familiarity in the world for her. The most profound, the most moving sight in the whole world must be a face.

There was a face, a vision, she does not know exactly when she saw it, and she is looking for it once again. But all the faces of the townsfolk come between her and her vision. Like the captain of the barge in Jean Vigo's film l'Atalante who has lost his wife and looks for her in a bucket of water, according to the folk tale that you can find the face of your lost love reflected in the water. When he doesn't see her in the bucket of water, he dives into the river.

It was purely for a resemblance to a vision that she examined the secret, mysterious, unrepeated faces she met in the street of Farr's Gin.

At the end of the story, on an errand for rainwater for her father's weekly shave, she stands by the rain barrel.

Clytie did the only thing she could think of to do. She bent her angular body further, and thrust her head into the barrel, under the water, through its glittering surface into the kind, featureless depth, and held it there.

So later she is found 'with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs.'

As a return to the human world after several days of illness, the 'kind, featureless depth' is as comforting as reading can get.

HOW MUCH EMPATHY DO YOU HAVE?

I've read Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout one and a half times in the past week. I was so uncomfortable with its contemporaneity that I had to start it again to see why. It's an almost invisible read, being set in the pandemic, its family narrative absorbed even as I read into the fabric of what I remember of those years. Maybe that's what I don't like about reading fiction set now. It disappears as you read it, merges with your own memory. Maybe that's exactly what most people like about it. 

That said, I have liked Elizabeth Strout from her earliest books. The level way she has of making her way through her characters' situations, the ordinary intimacy of it. Most of the characters' preoccupations concern loss and recovery of relations with family, and the warmth that crosses people's faces, masked or not, when they show understanding of other people. There's no malice and little hard feeling of any kind, except the narrator's own, and that's fairly mild by most standards. Her characters are her extensive life.

Some of her tics annoy me, like the tag, after some remark, 'is what I'm saying', or, 'I'm only saying', or 'what I mean is', all of which serve to make the narrator approachable, neighbourly. But I prefer not to be approached in this way. And even as I write that I'm writing something she would write. 

Reading a book like this constitutes an examination of the reader. How much empathy does she have for these people, or in general, for that matter?

Elizabeth Strout is an empathetic writer. She considers a policeman, watching him carefully.

I need to say: This is the question that made me a writer, always the deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person. .... It sounds very strange, but it is almost as though I could feel my molecules go into him and his come into me.

As Emma Thompson is, to the fullest extent, an empathetic actor, as I read in a New Yorker piece about her.

You're like a piece of blotting paper that has been put into a bowl of water. You cannot absorb anything else. If you're really having to create a different person you're tricking your subconscious. It's a big, fat magic trick. The hat you're pulling the rabbit out of is your own psyche. That's extremely demanding and weird, because you are in a sense no longer yourself.

The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was 'amazed' by how people were 'relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self'/ This myopia—a sort of 'inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything' —wasn't her creed. .... Millet is energised, instead, by how feelings are 'intermeshed with abstract thought,' with 'our place in the wider landscape'.

I read this by chance, in The New Yorker. I've also been looking at Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes. No empathy there, for sure. The wider landscape emptier than ever.

REVIEWING THE FOURTH WALL

We were painting the living room and my role was to review, revisit, shift, dust and generally aerate the bookshelf wall, the fourth wall. I began at the bottom right, through old telephone books, radio manuals, gardening, food, and pond life. To poetry and drama, ancient and modern; and thinking, ideas, science, Gödel Escher Bach. To autobiography, biography, memoirs and diaries. To fiction, twentieth century and onward. 

I got stuck at John Cowper Powys. I was supposed to be reducing the volume of the shelves, getting the horizontal books into the vertical. Tidying. Dusting. Reviewing. Wolf Solent was my first John Cowper Powys. They are broad books, nearly half a shelf. Would they stay or would they go? 

I went back up to the top left, under the blue cornicing. 19th century novels. Russian fiction. Red miniature editions, some vellum, some gilded. Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, for example. Dickens, Michael Fairless, The Roadmender. Michael Fairless is Margaret Barber. S/He was a wild success in the early part of the twentieth century.

I have attained my ideal: I am a road mender, some say stone breaker. Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other.

I moved the red miniature books around. Left some where they had been. Others went upstairs, under the eaves. A swatch of red vellum upstairs and downstairs. 

So I came back to John Cowper Powys from above, via Kathy Acker and everyone back to the letter p. There were some interesting bookmarks. And a lot of dust. It was good to get Svetlana Alexeivitch comfortable on the shelves. And Olga Tokarczuk. On the title pages of Rowan Hewison's Salt Pan, I found a long dedication across the title pages about our small literary moment in Paradiso, Amsterdam, circa 1981.

All this comfort was made possible by packing into a cardboard box an entire set of french and other study books, as Claire would call them, Genette, Sarraute, Barthes etc. Reshelving your library. Resetting your vertebrae. Dusting as you go. Books and shelves. Lives. Soul. It was altogether an emotional affair, and the tidied books, with some space for new ones, looked less like mine than before.

Barbara Comyns and Virginia Woolf

The Vet's Daughter meets Mrs Dalloway on Clapham Common and in The New York Review of Books. Barbara Comyns and Virginia Woolf rub shoulders. 'Life, Death. This Moment of June.'

The eponymous vet is a terrible man, cruel, self-seeking. He wants nothing of his dead wife or her, his, daughter, who dodges through her childhood as best she can, knowing all along no good can come of being peculiar. No wonder she has the gift of levitation. 

Mrs Dalloway has her party to organise. Ordering flowers. Introducing people. Becoming Lady Bexborough. Yes. And no. Becoming Septimus Warren, the soldier who chose death in the civilised world, whose soul had been forced by the war and obscurely evil doctors. 

Clarissa Dalloway, after a spell in the little room, away from everyone, goes back to the party.

She lives, but the death that she escaped remains in the book as an almost invisible trace of an ending that might have been.

At the end, after long travails, the vet's daughter levitates from Clapham Common and is trampled by the crowd when she comes back down, in her long white dress. So this is it, this is what dying is. 

The inquest was held today on the three people recently trampled to death by a crowd on Clapham Common. The victims were Alice Rowlands and Rosa Fisher, both of Battersea, and a man so far unidentified.

At the end of The Waves, Bernard exclaims, inwardly, "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!' This is what Mrs Dalloway says.

Counting Backwards from 100, Judy Kravis

In many insomniac nights I have started counting backwards from one hundred, looking for associations, counting my way through my life. Addresses, bus numbers, years, dates, Now that I have written down a version, I don't do it at night any more. I don't count backwards.  I sleep better. There's more room for dreams.

Here's the current end of Counting Backwards from 100

There are no number thirteen buses, I imagine

Twelve years a slave. Twelve years free 

Eleven pipers piping. If you like piping

Ten. One Oh. Forget it 

Dorothy L. Sayers' Nine Tailors were bells

Eight and a half. Fellini. Mastroianni over Roma 

Seven Years in Tibet

Now we are six 

Five Go Mad in Dorset

Four-minute warning before the world ends 

Three is not a crowd

Two of a kind is kindness itself 

One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so

Pig Earth, Once in Europa, by John Berger

A visit from Christina, who spent the summer milking goats and making cheese in the Swiss alps, made me think of John Berger who wrote about peasant life in the French alps in the 1970s and 80s. Peasant has its meaning still in French. Paysan, paysanne, creature of this land, knowing its habits and its ferocity, the shrill call of the goat:

The lament of breath issuing from a skin bag. The Greeks called the cry of the he-goat tragos, from which they derived tragedy.

In English a peasant is an idiot with a misfortunate past and a regrettable future. At best a lifestyle, a brand, a silhouette. A French boyfriend I had in my early twenties saw me bent double from the waist, picking a lettuce in my parents' garden. Tu es paysanne, he said, and I was pleased. 

For many years I have not looked at John Berger's books because I could hear his voice as I read. All the goat and shit and the wholesome authority were too clearly defined, whatever narrative or essayist voice he takes on. But it is many years since I read him, he has since died and the world has become noisier, and his voice, his insistence have grown quieter.

The stories in Pig Earth get longer as the book progresses and the writer's confidence in his own storytelling grows. In the last and longest story, John Berger becomes Jean, the narrator of  'The three lives of Lucie Cabrol'. 

Lucie Cabrol, known as the Cocadrille, a creature sprung from a cock's egg, a dwarfish wrong'un whose universe rose and fell and rose again, expanded to the zone she foraged. Jean the narrator finds the biggest cep he's ever seen and she seizes it. Everything on her alp she owns, she says, except the title. She dies of the fortune she reputedly gathered from foraging, axed through her skull. The money and the murderer were never found.

John Berger writes himself into a village in the alps. He shovels shit and herds goats, drinks gnôle, but the real participation is on the page, in the stories he wrote about the people he knew who'd lived there for generations. 

Pig Earth is first of the 'Into our labours' trilogy, published in 1979. In Once in Europa, the second volume published ten years later, the alp connects to the rest of the world in several painful ways. There is migration to factories, tanneries, chimneys to be swept in Paris. Men return triumphant and then fall. Women are temptresses and milkers, sustainers, or dead, or unknown. The title story 'Once in Europa' is about a factory that produces ferromanganese in blast furnaces. Workers are burned, maimed and killed, the surrounding landscape is poisoned. 

At the end of Pig Earth, John Berger wrote a historical afterword about the threat of extinction of peasants. Ten years later, when he published Once in Europa, one or two peasants had tractors and looked after land and animals on their own. By the end of the 20th century, in Western Europe, the extinction of peasants had effectively been achieved. There are some who, nostalgic for an imagined past, want to become peasants, to survive from the land with only a minimum of saleable product. But the pressures are immense.

As I learned a few weeks ago, the Ford factory in Cork was the first manufacturer in Europe of tractors. Mechanized agriculture and all that goes with it, started here, in 1919.

IVY AND STEVIE AND KAY DICK

Ivy and Stevie is an intermezzo for a wet autumn. Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith interviewed by Kay Dick, published by Allison & Busby in 1971. Stevie was easier on the psyche than Ivy, when I first read them, a merry outcast living with aunt, the Lion, endearingly strange in Palmer's Green. Ivy needed to situate herself in the civilised world, as she called it. She knew what it was. She was a stern observer. 

And her hair. The forward roll around a black velvet band. I've only known two women who did their hair like that: my aunt Lily, who read Alice in Wonderland upside down on festive occasions; and Vanessa's mother, who was South African, and kept a stern house, sheets sides to middle and stewed apple. 

Ivy Compton-Burnett partakes of both. 

Maybe I can't grow into Ivy because I can't accommodate the overarching family, the constant interaction. I can read her in small, detached doses. Less concerned with who is doing what to whom than taking a print in the void, the way my mother picked up Walter Scott in the middle of the night, and read any page or two. Ivy said to Kay that a plot was a washing line on which to hang her dialogue. Which suits my reading style. Dipping in, taking the temperature. Then returning to myself. 

I have been dipping into A House and its Head this week. Spending time with Ivy. Closing the book when I'd had enough conversation, enough intimation. When I wanted to sleep.

"Is anything serious the matter?"

"Well, we use words like "serious". But words do not make much difference do they?"

 

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD

On the first page of Barbara Comyns' Who was changed and Who was dead the river floods and ducks sail in through the drawing room windows of Willoweed House, setting the scene for radical disorder, in the family and in the village. Flood followed by pestilence and at the last a certain calm cut through with irony. 

Barbara Comyns' creatures are soaked in a kind of schoolgirl wickedness. The back flap of the book tells us that Barbara and her siblings were brought up by governesses and allowed to run wild. Ebin Willoweed, a former journalist, his children, Emma, Hattie and Dennis, his mother, Grandmother Willoweed, plus Old Ives the gardener, and a couple of maids, Eunice and Norah, make up the household, whose disarray marks it off from the rest of the village. 

There are two deaths by the end of chapter three, one in the flood, the other the doctor's wife who has an unstoppable nosebleed. In chapter four, the baker, Horace Emblyn, already distressed by an ulcer and the infidelities of his wife, decides to experiment with rye bread, and makes a small loaf to go out with all the bread orders in the village. People seem to like it; they order more and the baker employs a new man, Old Toby, who had been disfigured by quicklime in his youth. 

The miller is the first to go. He drowns himself. Then the baker's wife, then the village butcher, who slices open his throat into a wound that looks like a smile; as well as the Willoweed grandson, Dennis, who fades out in great detail about halfway through the novel. 

There was ergot in the rye flour. Ergot is one of the bases for lysergic acid. It thrives in a cold winter followed by a wet spring. The village is burning from within. Some are changed and some are dead.

The miller, the baker and the rye flour are but the backdrop to the dreadful Grandmother Willoweed who likes eating and hitting out and stamping her feet. She does not like to walk on land she does not own. 

The book gives us a middle-class shakedown in large gardens, by a river, with early motor cars and superstition. If you die giving birth you have a black baby. Ebin Willoweed's wife Jenny died giving birth to Hattie, who is black, and named for the doctor who delivered her, Dr Hatt. As the shakedown settles she's have a pony, and a dog, and go to a regular school, where they christen her AP, (African Princess). Everything turns out well for the ones who are changed, not dead; and maybe also for those who are dead. 

Grandmother Willoweed has had enough of being a caricature. Willoweed life will go on without her. Ebin, the father, does not go to London with Hattie in order to get away from his mother. He grows a big red beard, buys a boat and is known as Old Captain Willoweed. Emma marries a young doctor and becomes civilised, exemplary, alien. She produces a son who is wheeled round Kensington Gardens, heir to the Willoweed lands and money, according to the dictates of her grandmother. 

Savagery in the English countryside among the relatively well-born, drawn with a caustic humour, is a genre in itself in the early twentieth century. Barbara Comyns, Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm), Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Nancy Mitford, all of them born around the same time, have in common a sense of social and family structure and a need to tear at it from within, to slice it through and chop it about, make fun of it while demonstrating its invulnerability. 

Ivy Compton-Burnett, pronounced Cumpton Burnitt,

Ivy Compton-Burnett, pronounced Cumpton-Burnitt, was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf, one of twelve children to a homeopath by two different wives. None of the twelve children had issue. As if each generation were a set of library books kept within family walls. 

Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels are almost entirely dialogue. Such as you might get in a large family, divided down the middle by two senior wives in the early years of the twentieth century. The youngest, in The Mighty and their Fall, are about twelve, plus a girl aged 14, then a pair of older siblings aged about twenty, their father, Ninian, his mother Selina, daughter Lavinia, a nebulous Uncle Hugo, absent Uncle Ransom, plus Cook, and Ainger. This was the era of servants, and doors at which to listen to the flow of dialogue. This was the era of names like Hengist and Egbert. And Lavinia. Ninian. Selina, his mother.

Did Ivy C-B contribute to the dialogue in her own family, or are her novels projections of the way large families might work if people talked directly out of their inner lives? The truth coming out in dribs and drabs and almost immediately degrading nearly everyone in the house. Are these the conversations, the turns of reflection that Ivy knew from experience or is she filling in silences? She claims her life was uninteresting. So she writes to set it humming. She brings out in unlikely but compelling dialogue the process of a family. This is fiction, but wouldn't you like to have been in on the conversation?

"Well, that is her offer," said Selina." So you may have what is left."

"It has its own quality," said Lavinia. "She has little to give, and so offered little. She does not evade the truth."

"It seems a shadow of a letter, Father. It somehow has no substance."

"It means what it does, as you have said."

Everyone talks the same way in her books, age four or fourteen or fifty or eighty, the way people talk when you imagine them, when you project them into your own experience, out of your age-old reality into something with multiple manoeuvres and a last page. 

Rivka Galchen's father

In the New Yorker I read Rivka Galchen's personal history of her father, her happy childhood.  How do you get over a happy childhood? she asks. Most of us are stopped in our tracks by this. A happy childhood is a tough act to follow, she says. In her Wikipedia photo she does not look like a woman with a happy childhood. Then again I don't know if I'd recognise a happy childhood if I bumped into one. Her piece about her father was onward and urgent. Her mother was perhaps a dishrag. Happy childhood deals with less than you think.

On tv I saw Ralph Fiennes' Four Quartets. I read them anew in his performance. In the New York Review of Books I read about Piet Mondriaan, and Gilgamesh, and Josephine Baker, Louise Brooks, the dances of Pam Tanovitz. By my stove at the start of the evening, I read Fergal Gaynor's cubist portrait of Hippolytus, his dismemberment and reinstatement. A shake-up of the inheritance, every way you look. At my computer I read Counting Backwards from 100, my insomnia exercise made into a small book, a ramification of number memory and loose association.

We are into the rainy season. Mushrooms are good this year. The pond has started to flow after five months. 

THE COMFORT OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD

I have two copies of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party, one a British wartime edition, thin paper but clear printing, from 1942, the other a Knopf edition from 1923, the year after the stories were first published. The Knopf edition has wonderful endpapers, close relatives of the Omega workshop of Bloomsbury, as well as thick furry paper that tells you, before you've read a word, that you will be comfortable here. 

I re-read the Knopf edition, and I was comfortable, so much so that I came to the end of each story as you might come to the end of a nap. I have read Katherine Mansfield many times, and always found myself pleased with each story and then the next, till there were no more to read, and the leap to a book by someone else inconceivable for a while. 

Virginia Woolf, who knew KM quite well, envied a little her rise to fame, and distrusted her.

Ah, I have found a fine way of putting her in her place. The more she is praised the more I am convinced she is bad. After all, there's some truth in this. She touches the spot too universally for that spot to be of bluest blood.

This diary entry is from March 1922. Am I a Snob? was an essay she wrote in 1932. Yes, you might say. In another diary entry, from September 1921, we find VW dabbling in KM's stories and then needing to rinse her mind. In Dryden? she wonders. Still, if she were not so clever she could not be so disagreeable, she goes on.

There's an easy seduction to the stories of Katherine Mansfield. Her canvas is broad. VW stays in her own social stratum. The death of a cottager in KM's story The Garden Party is not equal to the death of the shell-shocked soldier in Mrs Dalloway. The soldier is also a poet. 

I will not read Dryden to rinse my mind after reading Katherine Mansfield. I might read Nietzsche.

NO PLACE WORSE THAN HOME: Katherine Mansfield Kirsty Gunn George Balanchine & Mozart

For many years after I moved to Ireland, people would ask was I going home in the holidays, and I said, this is home, here, where I live now. Where I grew up may be a backdrop, a scrim across my psyche, but it isn't home. Maldon, Essex, England, the World,  has not evolved into writing material. Not as such. Not as prose. Poetry makes do with less.

Katherine Mansfield writes stories from London and Paris, about her childhood in Wellington, New Zealand, which she left in 1903. Kirsty Gunn, who grew up in the same part of Wellington, fifty or more years later, now living in London and Scotland, spends a winter back in Wellington. Rereads Katherine Mansfield. Writes some new stories herself. Lives in the old neighbourhood. Walks the walk. With her two daughters. Opens the front door and sees the lamp within.

How can we talk about exile when we wanted to leave in the first place? Home is where you no longer are. Maybe there's no place worse than home, as Bruce from Glasgow said, in Brittany. 

Discuss.

While I was reading My Katherine Mansfield Project, by Kirsty Gunn, I read in the New Yorker about George Balanchine going back to Russia in 1962, after fleeing the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1924. On his return, with the ballet company he'd formed in New York, he was dispirited and depressed. He said, that's not Russia. That's a completely different country, which happens to speak Russian.

There was no more place to be exiled from. Exile was no longer a state of being; it was a flight—a flight into the pure glass-and-mirrored realm of the imagination, its own kind of home. 

Kirsty Gunn doesn't find her former self in Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand, she finds Katherine Mansfield, who has been fixed forever in her stories. George Balanchine is fixed in the repertoire he created for his New York City Ballet, an angelic world of abstraction and relief. I read, Kirsty Gunn, Katherine Mansfield, or Jennifer Homans writing about Balanchine going back to Russia, and know once more that home is not where I grew up, it's not the place where, as Robert Frost said, they have to take you in. It's Mozart, for me, at the end of the day. That's home. Among these books and that music. With the view of the meadow and the trees. A place that I've made, dug and planted and let live, as far as possible.

Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

Elizabeth Hardwick said that one's life, one's autobiography, is nothing other than what one has read. She liked to warm up before writing by reading Heine. 

My life, for the past couple of weeks, has been embedded in the novels of Turgenev: Fathers and Sons (twice), Smoke, in a beautiful edition with leather cover and gilded pages, and half of Liza. The New Yorker had a piece recently about a new translation of Fathers and Sons, which took me back to the top of my bookshelves (my life) where 19th century Russian writers live.

I have also had a cracking cold/cough, complete with a day of sneezing suited to empty a chest cavity more voluminous than I actually have. So I needed something substantial, distant and capacious. Turgenev was there on my parents' bookshelves too, and I can see why. His novels are full of discussion, and at about the level my parents would have related to: a flush of socialism, some music, literature, debate about all of these with, eventually, very few hard feelings.

These are men's books. There are no mothers and daughters, or not in the same household. Women are mothers (married to fathers) or they are aunts, sisters, widows or divorcees. They are introduced to others with their patronymic, their father's name, without which they are deemed incomplete or unknown. Fathers and son hold the floor, even, or especially, when the woman is strong-minded, like Madame Odintsov (Anna Sergyevna) who draws the two friends, the eponymous sons, into her net for a while.

One son, Arkady, is a romantic, happy to lie on his back and gaze at the sky. He is eventually attracted to Anna Sergyevna's sister Katya, who is quiet and young and plays the piano. Arkady and Katya meet in the cool of an ornamental temple.

Here, in the midst of the shade and coolness, she used to read and work, or to give herself up to that sensation of perfect peace, known, doubtless, to each of us, the charms of which consists in the half-unconscious, silent listening to the vast current of life that flows forever both around us and within us.

The other son, of a different family, Bazarov,  has no time for this kind of fancy talk. He is a nihilist, so-called, a radical, a sceptic, just as a susceptible to love but revealing it in short bursts and then dismissing it. He is training to be a doctor and is likely to recommend chemistry textbooks rather than literature, and to view the beauty of a woman's body as material for the dissecting table.

The two friends clash usefully, for the propagation of ideas. Conversation moves on the world as well as their friendship. One hates no one, the other hates so many. Arkady is timid, says Bazarov, he doesn't rely on himself much. He has ideals. He thinks Russia will come to perfection when every peasant has a nice clean house to live in. 

I look around my mental Irish landscape in 2022, full of nice clean houses and resplendent cars. And take refuge in the Bazarov's mother.

Anna Vlasyevna was a genuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times; she might have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days. She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirit, in unlucky meets, in the evil eye... 

My favourite among her beliefs is that a mushroom will not grow if it has been looked on by the eye of man. (We are in full mushroom season here.) (Is the eye of woman equally paralysing?)

Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver

A wet, warm afternoon in September, the stove going, nonetheless, and a Tove Jansson novel, The True Deceiver, about a young woman and her younger brother who is thought simple, about the machinations of a village during the northern winter, and how the sister contrives to move with her brother into the Rabbit House, home of wealthy artist Anna Aemelin. who makes books for children. 

I came to Tove Jansson through The Summer Book, which I first read in Bill and Katy's spare bedroom in Brampton, where I stayed while I was clearing out my father's house after he had died. With my brother. My brother and sister story resides there, if anywhere. The Summer Book was a rescue book. No plot, just situations on an island, in a family, the fragility of moss, the etiquette of islands. 

I didn't read the Moomin books until it was too late. There's only one chance to read children's books. Only one first time on a clean plate. The Moomins read at thirty or forty are too coy to be poetry, too cosy to be true. Maybe Tove Jansson thought so too, by the time she started writing for adults. Which is to say replacing one set of symbols for another.

Katri Kling, the unwilling, maybe sullen, maybe witching, viewpoint of The True Deceiver, has yellow eyes and so has her dog. Her dog has no name. Everything is with a view to further reversals or revelations in the snowiest winter anyone can remember. By the end it seems as if Anna Aemelin is the winner. Released by the yellow-eyed woman and her brother from the need to add rabbits to the ground she painted for her children's books.

Tarjei Vesaas' brother and sister in The Birds revolved around the simplicity of the brother. Tove Jansson has not fully entered Katri Kling. She is observing her. She's not sure why Katri Kling sets her sights on Anna Aemelin's Rabbit House. I'm not sure either. 

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

I started Delta Wedding on Castle Island last week. In that wide-open space, with only singular lives barely intersecting—a fat gull, a slim moon, a hare, and four seals—a vast plantation family in the Mississippi delta full tilt towards a wedding, is too much. 

Back home, looking out on the cut field, or awake at night, I can manage a crowded family with names running out at all angles: Battle, India, Shelley, Dabney, Troy, Man Son, Partheny, Roxie, Ranny, Bluet and Pinck, a flurry of aunts to rival P.G. Wodehouse, some with men's names, all with culinary specialities and other quirks. I can't have anyone in the kitchen while I'm making the cornucopias, I can't have anyone making beaten biscuits. around me, says one of them, Studney, Tempe, Primrose or Jim Allen.

This is a plantation organism, a family and its town, Fairchilds, its houses, servants, climate, seasons, its fair children humming underfoot. Space to reflect is hardwon. As we know. Here is Robbie, married to George, the Fairchild darling, who causes the moon to hang in the sky, striking out on her own. 

Here she was—Robbie, making her way, stamping her feet in the pink Fairchild dust, at a very foolish time of day to be out unprotected. There was not one soul to know she was desperate and angry.

The wedding itself almost vanishes under the tide of people it supports and the preparations they have all made. After the wedding of her second daughter, Ellen Fairchild, wife of Battle Fairchild, reflects on the rarity of time for reflection. She watches the dancing. She tries to encompass the family before her. 

She saw George among the dancers, walking though, looking for somebody too. Suddenly she wished she might talk to George. It was the wrong time—she never actually had time to sit down and fill her eyes with people and hear what they said, in any civilised way. Now he was dancing, even a little drunk, she believed—this was a time for celebration, or regret, not for talk, not ever for talk.

Aunt Ellen is Burt Lancaster as the Leopard, il gattopardo, walking away from the wedding feast of his two fine young people, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. And then, in a deft and glorious pursuit of family exactitude, she continues:

As he looked in her direction, all at once she saw into his mind as if he had come dancing out it leaving it unlocked, laughingly inviting here to the unexpected intimacy. She saw his mind—as if it too were inversely lighted up by the failing paper lanterns— lucid and tortuous: so that any act on his part might be startling, isolated in its very subtlety from the action of all those around him, springing from long, dark, previous, abstract thought and direct apprehension, instead of explainable, Fairchild impulse.