The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

The long and the short of it, in 1940s novels from Brooklyn and Piedmont, Italy.

The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which took several weeks to read, in the insomniac hours. Reading a 1940s bestseller takes the place of sleep. The growing tree, mentioned at judicious intervals, is ailanthus or tree of heaven; enough said. 

The short is The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese, which I'm halfway through in a day. The house on the hill is outside Turin in 1943, wartime; enough said. I have read other Pavese and recognise these houses, these hills, these women, his ghosts; perpetual edginess that the war confirms.

This is an ungainly tango. Forget blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Betty Smith and Cesare Pavese are more serendipitous, less felicitous. I can read a bestseller from 1944 and not a bestseller from 2025 (sauf a Graham Norton novel a couple of years ago; special pleading there). I like slim Italian literature from the 1940s and 1950s, much of it written by depressives. With a fascist state in your history, you're barely able to look ahead.

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.

The End of Me by Alfred Hayes

I stubbed my toe on the wood box in the night and so was laid up for the day, which was all wind and sugar as they used to say. I read The End of Me by Alfred Hayes end to end beside the stove and was well pleased. The limping slowed me down. After my visit to Essex I had a whole geophysical childhood to absorb. Reading someone else's tale can oil your own.

I have read two other novels by Alfred Hayes. Less novels than trajectories — I have always had trouble saying that word — poem hardly easier — and Alfred Hayes has a poetic trajectory. He makes for the end of himself with plenty ellipses so that you end at the last chapter at last light, spent as he is. 

BATS IN OCTOBER

A bat flew by outside, through the gingko and the service tree. I was thinking about Barbara Pym and then Betty Smith, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn which was my sleep inducer before I went to London and Essex, book fair and woods and marshes of origin, respectively. I left Betty Smith at home and took with me Quartet in Autumn; I was midway before I left so maybe in Stockwell and in Boreham, Essex, I could bed down in the mid-twentieth century according to Barbara Pym. Her quartet of people work in the same office, the two women retire first, the two men look on and discuss the women, who do not discuss the men, or anything, with each other: one is solo eccentric, entrenched, her garden shed full of milk bottles; the other, timid, pliant, settles onto the shifting tide. 

Back home, exhausted, full of the past, I could not think who was who in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But that doesn't matter.

poetry this summer

Since soundeye in July I have read poetry as the start of the working day, that is, five o'clock in the afternoon onwards listening to Don Giovanni or Schubert. Mairead Byrne, Randolph Healy, Fergal Gaynor. Later Peter Manson came by post. We are Mallarmé confederates.

I remembered Anne Carson's Plainwater which I first read in the pink room upstairs at the Beckett Atelier looking over the Seine, drinking choco tea and writing my diary at length. 

Then Lena Tsykynovska came to stay in the cabin, from Odessa via Boston and Chicago. She was sure there must be a poetry bookshop in Dublin if not in Cork. I gave her a cucumber in the greenhouse and she bit the end off straightaway like a character in Tchekov.

Si la beauté n'était la mort was one of my favourite Mallarmé lines.

I told Lena about the old man who lived up at the reservoir and didn't know if it was beautiful or not. Many people are uneasy with beauty, I said. 

One way or another I have been driving through beauty and her acolytes this summer. I have caught my breath and run on as best I can through differing fracture and dispersal. This selection of the day and night. Your concerns, your reading, your innerness, your onwardness, your trepidation, loss, your breakfast.

The face of Mallarmé on the cover of the September 22nd New Yorker is calm, thoughtful, wrapped and ribboned. M. Kalman finds a thinner younger Mallarmé than the plaid suggests. Halfway to Proust perhaps. 

PARTY GOING

Henry Green liked his present participles, the borrowed present of his writing is what he's constantly moving towards, pausing at, giving up at. The book ends when the present participle snaps.

Party Going was the first of his books I read, and the one I go back to when I want to spend time at Victoria Station in a mid-twentieth century fog. This time it was the pull back moment, fifty pages from the end, when Henry Green/Yorke is aloft in a railway station considering the party he has assembled, that gave me pause in the middle of the night, which is when I have been reading lately.

Two hundred pages in he pauses. The taut bright young things with their cabin trunks their exhaustive dealings, their people guarding. The train station has become a living being. That's where Henry Green weighs in.

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.

  This is what I'm waiting for in words and in music.

So crowded together they were beginning to be pressed against each other, so close that every breath had been inside another past that lipstick or those cracked lips, those even teeth, loose dentures, down into other lungs, so weary, so desolate and cold it silenced them.

 What do you say then?

You want the moon, said Edwards.

Henry Green Remembers

Henry Green wrote a memoir Pack My Bag on the eve of world war two: he was convinced he would die and he wanted to die up to date, having said it in so many words. I like his sentences; they keep you awake. Like Gertrude Stein but slightly more punctuation. Halting. Lurching. Tense & lyrical.

As we listen to what we remember, to the echoes, there is no question but the notes are muted, that those long introductions to the theme life is to be, so strident so piercing at the time are now no louder than the cry of a huntsman on the hill a mile or so away when he views the fox. We who must die soon, or so it seems to me, should chase our memories back, standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be too near what they once meant. Like the huntsman, on a hill and when he blows his horn, like him some way away from us.

Some way away, is right. Henry Green felt far away. At his private school, his public school, at Oxford. You can be isolated from anything. Let's agree to agree.

The Reading Trail

Spending a couple of weeks at home on my own, I read as if maintaining a necessary substrate: with meals, between meals, before sleep, during insomnia. I have read two novellas by Henry James, three novels by Muriel Spark and her autobiography, whose evocation of publishing in postwar Britain led to Diana Athill's memoir Stet, which is about the same thing, and may in turn, through its chapter on Jean Rhys, take me back to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Entrenched in my own life, weather and upkeep, I need these versions of elsewhere, the parallel existence of other people. And I need it to be written. Novels write it, poems write it, memoirs write about it. Diaries take the plunge, eyes closed. All good. 

Diana Athill writes about Jean Rhys, and how, in her last years, she struggled to finish Wide Sargasso Sea. She could hardly speak but she could see the words she wanted to add. The pages of the novel had a physical photovoltaic existence, including all future amendments.

Muriel Spark read Henry James

I'd been reading Henry James and switched to Muriel Spark who also read Henry James, and, in Loitering With Intent, pulls herself up short for writing something Henry James would have written. She steers her writing passage through all she has read and all she has lived. She's abrasive and cool, if not nasty. Switched from being jew-ish to full Roman Catholicism. She was my parents' generation. They talked about Memento Mori with their friends circa 1960 — a novel in which everyone dies — with an excited contemporaneity beyond my emotional age. I took note. I re-read Muriel Spark rarely enough to forget the plots and often enough to know how this kind of wryness works, where she is in relation to what she writes, how she digs and evades. She's there all the time, that's for sure. The hand of Muriel is on yours from the start.

Henry James & Mahler

First The Spoils of Poynton then What Maisie Knew. As always with Henry James a materiality — the spoils of Poynton are priceless therefore must ultimately go up in smoke — and a bottomless enquiry. What poor dear Maisie knows is bottomless. She has two mothers two fathers and two governesses. As far as family can be stretched, she stretches it in her mind's eye: who is lying, who is afraid of whom and why, who will vanish or transform next. Now a governess then a stepmother.

Always an excess of love amid the sundering and reshaping of protofamilies. Life is for constant unpicking as it happens: is this Mr Merriam or Lord Eric or the Count or the Captain. Who will the next father be. What of the battle to be Maisie's mother.

Is it possible to write about reading Henry James without writing like Henry James.

While listening to Janet Baker sing Mahler songs.

Letters to her daughter, Madame de Sévigné

I have few leather-bound gilded books, and only the letters of Madame de Sévigné were a gift, not made directly to me, but at one remove. A friend of my mother's had a maiden aunt in Paris, whom I visited once. She may have been called Miss Hogan, and she lived in the longest street in Paris, the rue de Vaugirard. I was twenty, and shy. She was in her seventies, and served a formal tea. After she died, a few years later, my mother's friend suggested I might like the Madame de Sévigné volume, as well as three large linen pillowcases. I was, and am still touched that my mother's friend, whose children I babysat when I was a teenager, thought I was a candidate for linen pillowcases and seventeenth century letters. But she judged well. The pillowcases are in use on the sofa in the new room where we sometimes read or nap in summer. 

I have read Madame de Sévigné a few times. This time, in this in-between season, has been perhaps the most poignant. I have relished the firmly vertical Didot font and the thick pages, unevenly cut and difficult to turn, which made my reading even slower and more careful. It's many years since I was in the habit of reading french this old, but I made my way into it, not worrying when there were phrases I didn't quite understand. It was a relief to feel at this distance from the intimate though formal speech of a seventeenth century aristocrat. Perhaps even the formality, the past historic tenses correctly used, the words I no longer knew, brought this mother's longing to be with her daughter into even sharper focus. The mother lived in the north of France, the daughter in Provence. Even a journey from Brittany to Paris took many days.

We were in Cork a few days ago, meeting our new cabin guest. As she waited for her bag to be unloaded from the bus, we watched a mother-daughter reunion, the long hug and tears of joy, the slight pull back now and then as they looked at each other after long absence, maybe the summer, maybe longer.

 

Madame de Sévigné in Peru

My mother liked The Bridge of San Luis Rey but I didn't till now. It sounded real and that wasn't what I was looking for when I was growing up. Now, many years later, and twenty, maybe, since my mother died, I pull it out of the shelves, fourteenth printing of 1928, Bloomsburyish loose cover and wide, chalky pages, and it turns out to be what I need to underpin my shaky nights.

Five people fall to their death when an ancient rope bridge collapses in Peru. Father Juniper undertakes to find out who they were and maybe assert the justice of their death, or situate death such that the reader might ponder. The seventeenth century tone — think Madame de Sévigné's letters to her daughter — except in this case the daughter did not love her mother — au contraire — is seductive in the middle of the night. This is just the reading I need.  

Aberration by Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino

There has been a lurch towards the 1970s and 1980s, some of the nether regions of my bookshelves. I had not looked for a long time at Douglas Woolf or Gilbert Sorrentino, and I wonder why. Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide Hotel, a pleasing rambling take on Rimbaud's 'Voyelles', I did read many times, sometimes out loud in class, when I was teaching. I haven't felt ready for Mulligan Stew after the first read; it is immensely long and prefaced by the many rejection letters it generated. I also haven't gone back to Joyce. Nor I think, will I. So much reading swirls around early zeal, and so much zeal does not find a future.  

Aberration by Starlight is a charming title for a short book published in a Penguin American Fiction list in 1980. Though formally innovative, with chapters of different styles and viewpoints circulating around a father/his daughter/her son/her would be lover, it is somehow only that. Or: the excesses and stylisation of all the characters, charmless as they must be in the eyes of all the others, is such that this reader does not want to hear another take in another chapter. Though, being cursed with diligence, I read to the end, just in case the formal experiment relents into a human place to rest and take human breath.

fade out by Douglas Woolf

Bought in 1981, as per my inscription, perhaps not read since, and from the start I know why. fade out by Douglas Woolf is relentlessly external and not quite picaresque, the reverse of an adventure: Mr Twombly, Dick, leaves Cynthia, his tortoise and Kate his daughter and her family and the home they put him in, for a life on the road, towards Phoenix Arizona, with Ed Behemoth, ex-pugilist. The best thing is that they fetch up in the hotel of an abandoned town a hundred miles from Phoenix. They'll set up the hotel again, shelter other vagrants like their younger selves.

I'd rather watch a movie, find myself in a recently abandoned hotel; this isn't reading, it's cantering through a semi-peopled landscape. That's why the hotel is a relief.

Antiquities & The Patients All Seemed Happy

Cynthia Ozick in her mid-nineties takes on the Petrie family, specifically Sir Flinders Petrie, Egyptologist, and a long-closed school, now inhabited by ageing trustees, the youngest of whom, our narrator, is a Petrie cousin, once a pupil at the school. The focus of Antiquities is the friendship between Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie and another pupil called Ben-Zion Elefantin, who comes from Elephantine Island in the Nile and is as mysterious as his name. So do the creatures of this novella intertwine. Literally, shadowy, at one point.

I have plenty of patience with high language and erudition. There's something peaceful about having departed the usual narrative realm. My own life seems to lurch among extremes of human life, I can take refuge in tales like this one, whose main strength is in unresolved airing of past events. I've read most if not all of Cynthia Ozick's earlier books. 

Cynthia Ozick is a climb at first; though eventually I was cruising on all I'd never know about the Petrie men and Ben-Zion Elefantin, then I was ready for The Patients All Seemed Happy by Lianne O'Hara some thirty pages of realigned language from the archive of Grangegorman, for a hundred years the biggest mental hospital in Ireland. Grangegorman is now the campus of the Technological University of Dublin. 

They are not sure where to put me. /Hunger is no excuse for larceny. 

I tell them I am with child and push /out my belly on the exhale.

No one believes a lunatic.

          The floors shine with effort and soap. /My mouth is inspected for foul language

          but I show them nothing. / Strange hands fondle my stomach.

(Still in doubt, I think.) 

           The walls are cold and smooth. /I hear the echo of a voice:

            The majority of those seeking discharge were unfit cases. 

                      I wonder if I am an unfit case. 

Edith's Diary, My Diary

It's a while since I read a page-turner where things were going to get worse; you know from the dull start in New Jersey/Pennsylvania in the 1960s, Edith's Diary will be a lie. Edith's life continues to split off from Edith's diary. Her 100% dreadful son, in her diary is an engineering hero with a lovely wife and child near Princeton, New Jersey. Her husband leaves her for a younger woman, whom he eventually marries, and has a daughter with. Meanwhile Edith, as her diary sharpens into fresh fantasies, sculpts the head of her son in plasticine and joins him, little by little, in delinquency.

This is Patricia Highsmith. It will get worse.  

DAILY LIVING

When I sit in a café I sit in the lineage of all other cafés I have known. I should sit at least once a week in the quiet season, as it is now, and read Gertrude Stein on Paris France. Her plain speech clears the raddled head like a large glass of very fresh cool water. I don't think Gertrude Stein was ever raddled.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature. 

 And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way had to be found naturally they needed France.

Really not, french people really do not believe that anything is important except daily living and ground that gives it to them and defending themselves from the enemy. Government has no importance except insofar as it does that.

Gertrude is perhaps, in her time, in her freshness, what my friend Pete Lyle calls haute fuck. It was 1940 and she was able to say Paris was exciting and peaceful. She had lived there since 1903.

As the rain pours down for the first time in months I am fully doused in what the ground gives to me. It takes a pot of gold to raise a rainbow, as Randolph Healy says; maybe have a shot / at a language with no present or future. I open The best of (what's left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne a time or two in the day. —Quiet, I know what it is. It is a human hand.

At night I've been reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse. So much plot and impersonation and machination you cease to care who is doing what to whom, and ride a chapter or two in the early hours.

When you get to know Pongo better, said Lord Ickenham, you will realize that he is always like this — moody, sombre, full of doubts and misgivings. Shakespeare drew Hamlet from him. You will feel better, my boy, when you have had a drink. Let us nip round to my club and get a swift one. 

Days and Nights with Aldo Buzzi

Aldo Buzzi wears his knowledge lightly, he comes to land lightly too, on what he chooses to tell. He's an architect as well as a writer, but doesn't write of architecture, more of food, and travel, and the life that is open to those who have the freedom to look. Journey to the Land of the Flies begins with one of my favourite things.

I stayed for some time in the lovely Villa Musco, near the village of Spartà, in Sicily, not far from Messina. I had been given a beautiful bedroom, with great, transparent curtains at the windows which swelled slowly in the breeze filtering between the wooden slats of the open shutters and kept out the flies and mosquitoes that are seldom absent from earthly paradises.

In a self-interview in A Weakness for Almost Everything, he describes his ideal house.

I prefer a house in the city, surrounded by a garden that faces on one side the main street and on the other the sea or the country. It's a house that doesn't exist. This house should also look out on a solitary meadow where a donkey, a calf and a chicken are feeding. Plus a dog, a cat, and a couple of blackbirds.

I need the leisure of someone else's pictures, tastes that coincide with mine but elsewhere. A net curtain billowing not far from Messina, a villa in the land of the flies, and at the same time in Tenby, a guest house on the way back to Ireland one year. On Tenby beach, on Saturday, I ate a peach.

I have been reading some of the Coloured Books in order to read a selection out loud, amid a tribe of poets in a former bakery, upstairs in Shandon Street, on Saturday.

Aldo Buzzi (pronounced Bootsie) mistrusts any book that doesn't mention food.

 

SEVEN APPLES (MORE)

The kind of reading that leads to re-writing is shifty and robust: something is already there on the page, but every word and line is mutable, on its way and willing. I have been re-reading my 8 pages on apples, rearranging their boxes, text boxes, that is, on the 8 pages and at the back of my brain. I read in fits and starts, pushing the pages around like bread dough. Or throwing them up in the air, mentally, and waiting to see how the history of apples as I understand it looks next day. Eventually they all go quiet.

A perfectly good coma

I took Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley up to the pond, and read a few pages of the title story before coming to a halt at this phrase: 'A perfectly good coma, wrecked by nightmares'. I have come to a halt on this page before. Her defiant common sense brings me as much peace as a Mozart piano sonata. I put the book down and closed my eyes in the sun. I wonder if my mother had nightmares when she was in her end of life coma. Grace Paley brings me often to stupefied recognition: her vehemence, right-mindedness, her language plucked from every recess of her life at the pace of her life. This time I liked 'Faith in a Tree' and 'Faith in the Afternoon' best. 

In The New York Review of Books I read a piece about Marcel Proust and his jewishness, or not. Strange to come in on him like this, up at the pond, alongside Grace Paley, and her jewishness, and mine. So there we are, on a fine day, the three of us pulling duckweed out of the pond with a net, reading some more, lying back, then going for a dip.

Women Talking: England & New York

The fifth Elizabeth Bowen novel in my recent run was The Little Girls, one of the talkiest of her novels. Even taking into account my weakened, flu-ish state these past days, I struggled to stay with the little girls and the women they became. They had nicknames, which doesn't help the reader's focus. Clare was Mumbo and Sheila was Sheikie and Diana was Dicey. Their concerns revolve around a coffer they buried in the grounds of their school when they were eleven or twelve, containing unnamed objects they each chose, to be discovered by someone in the future, and a new iteration of this in a kind of cave near Dicey's (Diana's, now Dinah's) home. There's great emphasis on houses and their objects, and much discomfort around emotions: talk blurs rather than reveals, so much so that I found myself only imagining these women in their settings and taking no interest in who they were or had been. I kept imagining Elizabeth Bowen in her society — polite yet wilful, almost eccentric but not quite — and in her house in North Cork, visited by various culturati and relatives or near-relatives, a society that knew itself but did not warm the cockles of anyone's heart. I started to read the book again to see if these women and their objects would come clear, but gave up after a few chapters. 

Grace Paley, on the other hand, in the last of her three collections of stories, Later the Same Day, plunges me from the first sentence into groups of friends in a time and a place, mid-twentieth century and New York. Not only are these women talking to each other, there is no style in the stories other than the talking style. Here is a writer who talked life into being, who talked relationships and politics in the voices she had heard all her life. She pulls writing into the world she knows. Elizabeth Bowen pulls the world she knows into writing. Neither is a world I know firsthand, but Grace Paley's is the one I'm drawn to, the one I almost envy, perhaps because her jewishness makes the lifelong attachments and warm humanity she writes about seem viscerally close to who I am, or at any rate who I might have been. Others have talked about families where vehement discussion about politics was the norm, where real concern transmuted into action and consensus.

Last night, in the last story in Later the Same Day, I read, twice, startled each time, the word intelligentsia. When did I last read/hear/say that word? Probably never said it; it would have seemed at least presumptuous. Now practically seditious, or just irrelevant. An end of night dream brought it into focus. A large room, full but spacious, lots of tables, people eating or talking or reading or writing. I considered for a while which table to choose: one that would let me eavesdrop or join in the conversation, or one where I could write, and think, and daydream. I think I chose the latter.

A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen at home, more or less

A girl wearing a muslin dress she found in a trunk in the attic, goes out to look at the landscape wearing it, diffusing at the end of a hot summer. Later she finds a packet of love letters which she hides under a stone beneath an elder bush, and her younger sister finds and so we all come to understand something but not everything. Every time you learn something —who the letters were to, for example — you feel immediately you didn't need to know, you just needed to step outside in a muslin dress in north county cork, early twentieth century, and sense the summer ending.  

strangeness at the end of may

I read three Elizabeth Bowen novels in a row: The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart and Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Children all askew, often sad, and aside, long-legged girls and young women shift from place to place for obscure reasons, strong compulsions run amok, they're observant, these long-legged girls and young women, as you need to be if you live on shifting sands. Dodging what? With a view to what? Her teacher Miss Smith asks Eva Trout, age sixteen, newly arrived at the school, if 'here' seemed strange still. Eva replies 'Anywhere would seem strange that did not'.

All Elizabeth Bowen's girl creatures can relate to this. The wayward English chill and freedom, hairpins flying, as with Virginia Woolf. I too can get there in a trice. The pleasure of pinning strangeness to the page, this is the locus, the focus, of reading as the season shifts.

 

French houses with novels passing through: William Maxwell and Elizabeth Bowen

An American couple are paying guests in a château in the Touraine after the war; their french is poor, they bring nylon stockings to give to the cook and the maid; they know not what to expect but they're willing for anything, and curious about this battered France, her codes, her closed core, her fictions and disclosures. How can you ever know what happened in this house, around it, through it, however bereft you will be to leave, you will leave, and later write a book about it. Not being rude. Being thorough, and observant, polite and contained, willing, apologetic, curious, always.

Two children wait in the house in Paris in the 1930s, one for a mother the other for a train; the train arrives and the mother doesn't. Waiting, in transit, makes you observant. 

A woman came out with a tray of mimosa and the raw daylight fell on the yellow pollen: but for that there might have been no sky. 

The Château by William Maxwell, and The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen. Two french buildings with novels inside them. This is how I pass the days. After The House in Paris I read The Death of the Heart. The days are cooler, windy, with rain, more incision than blessing.

 

Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad

An article in The New Yorker about Mark Twain sent me to the bedroom bookshelves to see what I had. Tom Sawyer was too big a volume for outdoor reading and A Life on the Mississippi or A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur too decayed to be disturbed. The article characterised America as half-grown, like Huck Finn. I chose The Innocents Abroad. 

Innocents Abroad were innocents indeed. Or Mark Twain is a careless showman feeding an eager audience. My undated, pirated edition from London, a pinched hardback look, tight print occasionally blurry, especially at the bottom of the page. The innocents, rich enough to pay a thousand dollars for this bash into the unknown: over the bumpy Atlantic, stopping at the Azores, and then Gibraltar, Tangiers, France, Italy, a disparate group constantly off on side-trips to Paris, London or Switzerland, reconvening in Genoa, on to Rome. 

I watched The Talented Mr Ripley the other night: more innocents abroad, rich innocents. Wealth does bring a kind of innocence; there's so much you don't see when you're rich. You travel under R, and that's just the beginning of the false pretences.

I enjoyed Mark Twain at Père Lachaise cemetery, and at Versailles, where he marvelled at the precision that made up the general effect of the clipped trees. Then he's on to Milan, gazing at The Last Supper, telling his readers what they're supposed to think and undermining them. He's a digester of culture; as he raises a masterpiece he drops it.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand—and more especially I cannot understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depôts and such marvels of turnpikes. Why, these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line as smooth as a floor, and as white as snow.

 Then Venice. 

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they battled ... the Autocrat of Commerce ... Mother of Republics ...

He stayed at the Grand Hotel d'Europe. The talented Mr Ripley rents a palazzo. Then Rome. Mark Twain is a digester. Reader's Digest. We last see Mr Ripley on a boat to Greece, travelling under R.

what if there is no story

Her side of the story by Alba de Céspedes, mid 20th century Italy, the anti-fascist sector. I became impatient with her side of the story, and indeed his. Halfway through I found I was galloping. I only wanted to know what happened and I didn't even want that.

Instead I read Steps by Maurice Scully, late 20th century Ireland, Lesotho, Italy, early 2lst.

Nothing is nothing. I am the perfect citizen.

Finitude is rubbish, everybody knows that.

No wonder the secret police are busy. Phone me

(to lie in bed Understanding Poetry) phone me

when you get back 

DANCING FLIES

I finished Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane, read the first few pages again, then watched the dancing flies above the pond, buffeted now and then by a northeast breeze whenever the sun went behind a cloud; the massed flies buffeting, in their turn, the whirligig beetles. You stand more chance of following a whirligig beetle than a dancing fly, if you can choose one dancing fly in the thick of the dance. 

Dancing flies — their real name — do not bite, do not land, they dance, and now and then concede to the breeze. I look into them, trying to choose one and happily fail as they swing southwest in a rush of billows.

For some days I've been thinking what I'd like to say about reading Gerald Murnane, his phrases/places that are his points de repère and the impetus of reading him. Those small bursts of wind that seem to confer order, or rhythm, or conviction, among the dancing flies, bring his writing, his reading/writing/remembering, into just the right not quite focus. 

The Seamstress and the Wind

In this week's twilight I read The Seamstress and the Wind, which I have had for some years, but didn't register the first time, the wrong time, evidently. This time it was like a nursery slope out of the last César Aira, a desire not to quit yet, with so much en mouvement, so much to play for, I noticed more, I'm sure, the colours, the flying wedding dress, the mummified armadillo/nouveau truck.

This evening I read the first few chapters again as the stove got going after a good day in the garden, stay long enough to see the story encouraged into life in a Paris café. I see him off down the road, Hail César, and the seamstress, the wind, the truck, the taxi, the wedding dress, the Monster.

The visceral Signor Aira

Mozart String Quintets

April outside in the early evening

Journey of a face: César Aira

Reading César Aira to discover I have been in dire need of something like this: a hundred pages of rare and rich uncertainty: what next and why, all known frames dissolved and resurrected all the time.  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter begins sedately, in the early nineteenth century, testing our patience for history, forcing us this way and that. 

"Rugendas' second and final voyage to America lasted seventeen years, from 1831 to 1847. His industrious journeying took him to Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil again and Argentina, and resulted in hundreds, indeed thousands of paintings."

Travel and painting were entwined like fibres in a rope. One by one, the dangers and difficulties of a route that was tortuous and terrifying at the best of times were transformed and left behind....  Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once.

By page seventeen he has me. I read most of the book over a cloudy afternoon and a sleepless night; finished it just now. The ending is orchestral. The artist Rugendas, after horrendous and delirious experiences, all the nerve-endings of his face open after a gory accident, finds himself in Indian wars; he wears a mantilla even as he sketches, reminds me of Paddy Shine up at the Lodgefest a few years ago, behind a mantilla or similar, black, as he drummed into his next move, which was just then, and then some. 

Also, Pierre in the film of War and Peace, watching from a small rise above the pitch, bespectacled, writing notes on the Battle of Austerlitz.

What we bring to our reading of anything is multitudinous, subtle.

 César Aira is excellent at reminding us of that. 

Reading your mind

It would be good to think that reading a book, reading book after book, honed more general reading skills, like reading your mind, your own and yours, dear reader, companion, fellow-sleeper, fellow insomniac, knowing, as far as is reasonable, who exactly is kicking whom around.

Flannery O'Connor

Dug over two or three beds in the veg plot; ground very dry and hard; hitting thick sods may be of a piece with reading the stories of Flannery O'Connor, several hundred pages of making your way towards death or other disaster. The end of each story is such a plunge I have to wait, if not plunge myself, into our pond.

Flannery kept peacocks; she lived with her mother on the family farm called Andalusia, in Georgia; ill with lupus, an awkward woman in her photos, her stories are the inside lupus voice, wrestled through with Catholic devotion and sacrifice, the tearing of flesh; someone will have fallen off the edge by the end.

The diary of Fanny Burney

I started reading Fanny Burney's diary — a 1940 Everyman edition I haven't looked at in decades. Perhaps after my week in France, a major diary moment, the idea of a late eighteenth century diary was appealing, and after a number of late-night short bursts of reading without great involvement, one day this week I spent much of a day feeling not so well and lay on the sofa in the new room with a hot water bottle and read more than a hundred pages. Weakness gave me patience with old-fashioned language, and a new-found susceptibility. 

Fanny Burney had no formal education at all, but grew up in a cultured household and educated herself by reading from the family library. Thus are free spirits made. For a number of years she was Keeper of the Robes at the court of George the Third, and became close to Queen Charlotte. Illumination here from  The Madness of King George. Fanny Burney slips in beside Helen Mirren's portrayal of Queen Charlotte. The crossover is in itself touching. Ill-health forces her to quit. She is sad to leave.

By now I am thoroughly engaged with this diarist, and can visualise her in the diary silences as well as in its reported days. She addresses frequently her two sisters, especially Susy, as if she's writing for them. Her diary permeates her family. The two sisters, who were considered more favoured than Fanny, did receive two years of education in France, but there's no resentment, and only affection for her father, as well as an extra father known as Daddy Crisp.

The finale came last night, awake as usual, and near the end of the diary: Fanny Burney, F. Burney married a Frenchman and became Madame d'Arblay. They spend some years in France, amid festering franco-britannic relations. No free movement here. A passport was more literal then: issued for one journey. Six weeks to negotiate crossing the Channel was nothing. 1815, and Bonaparte was ready for the fall. Madame d'Arblay left Paris at the dead of night and arrived in Belgium in time for Waterloo.

That day, and June 18th, I passed in hearing the cannon! Good heaven! what indescribable horror to be so near the field of slaughter! such I call it, for the preparation to the ear by the tremendous sound was soon followed by its fullest effect, in the view of the wounded, the bleeding martyrs to the formidable contention that was soon to terminate the history of the war. And hardly more afflicting was this disabled return from the battle, than the sight of the continually pouring forth ready-armed and vigorous victims that marched past my windows to meet similar destruction.

Reading Anne Carson in Paris and at Méricourt: Plainwater

I thought before I came to Paris that I would not haunt my old haunts, I would start again, but here I am, haunting, in an average café, with an omelette and a glass of wine, savouring the word Sully on his Hôtel across the street, and reading Anne Carson, a little, watching cyclists turn en masse onto the rue St Antoine.

Anne Carson on The Life of Towns: 'I am a scholar of towns, she says, let God command that. To explain what I do is simple enough.' 

The simpler you get the harder it is. Anne Carson leaps about & leaves spaces into which you fit— your omelette—your understanding—her writing hurtles, short talks, diary, things to say. 

A large part of the book is a diary written along the camino de compostela. My visit to Paris and Méricourt sur Seine was a diary week. I woke up, made tea, read Anne Carson, wrote my diary and looked at the Seine outside, the barges loaded with sand, gravel, and the bargees' cars. 

Have you seen Jean Vigo's film L'Atalante?

Anne Carson is in love with knowledge, she says. Each day of her diary is prefaced with a quote from one of the ancients, eastern or western. The depths and lacunae of ancient texts bring on her lurching style, words pulled from unexpected places, glistening.

Humpty Dumpty At Home

 Philip K Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, my choice this week. Going into abeyance. I always liked that word. I have been reading my America diaries, 1977 and 1980-1 and writing Monday Night At Home, after the radio programme, circa 1963, which I loved, where I first heard Ivor Cutler. Philip K Dick is never at home. No Direction Home. Not Monday nor any other night. The muddying of capitalism in Oakland, late nineteen-fifties. Humpty is a car mechanic, Dumpty is a car salesman. 

Why this was the choice a few days before going to Paris, I have no idea. Abeyance, perhaps. The chance to read afresh, in all innocence.

SPENT LIGHT : A GOOD RUIN

Architect Louis Kahn said a building is only good if its ruins will be good, I read in Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Louis Kahn believed that we humans are all made of spent light— ruins of another kind. I read Lara Pawson and as I read I am not sure this is where I want to be, on this bed of anger, indignation, among the barbed domestic objects of Lara Pawson's life, which is your life, my life, the objects that populate our domesticity, make up our errant psyche. 

The thing is, I like a bit of labour. I feel complete when I get down on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor. I take real pleasure retrieving the large sponge from the cupboard beneath the sink.

I polished the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor today. I know what she means. She and I can meet on our hands and knees.

Which is to say, viscerally. In a building, empty or full.  Ideal for nighttime reading; you read in good faith, you don't know if a line or two will gel and carry you or simply you'll get tired enough to sink into your own world, which is sleep.

Sunday Lunch in Ballinhassig, cooked by Joe, who had built his house from dreamtrade, the company he built on the red tape of international trade, he'd done the Ballymaloe cookery course, bought the Cambridge Beckett Letters and started Proust. It's a great beginning, I said, 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' Actually I said that more to his daughter Lia, who is fifteen. She has no idea how going to bed early is a good beginning for anything, but she might remember later. 

Death Row, Texas, Global Indignation

In three consecutive baths I read an article by Lawrence Wright  in the New Yorker about a group of women on death row in Texas. I hadn't thought to read it but then I did. How does the New Yorker celebrate its centenary but with this enormous iniquity: women who seem to have done terrible things but if you consider their lives, their early years of abuse and neglect, if these women have killed someone it is equal to their having been killed, slowly, from the beginning, so any crime, so-called, any evil, any darkness clinging to them is hardly their own, and that's what they must die for.

J. M. Coetzee, Booker books

Whenever people ask what I read I start by exclusion: I don't read books in the headlines, except long afterwards. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1999, and only now, in 2025, I read it, and find myself impatient with the plottedness, careful and incisive as it is, historical and compassionate, forcefully engaged with maleness and its needs, mindful of history, careful —and distracted — with family.  

In the last week or two I have read Coetzee's three autobiographical books: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, and dipped into his correspondence with Paul Auster.  How he dealt with himself there is somehow more palatable than the fiction structure built in Disgrace around David Lurie, Communications Lecturer, twice divorced, etc, to allow him to think around himself. I couldn't take the opera that Professor Lurie was writing about Byron's latter years. Does he really need to concoct an opera around his baser instincts.

That's why I don't read Booker Prize novels. I feel forced into a bottomless query. I'd rather be out routing compost heaps. 

The Moon and the Bonfires — Cesare Pavese

You have to read books twice in February. The mist is down. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese you'd have to read twice at any time of year. I read the first chapter twice, to begin with. Twenty years on a man returns to the Piedmont hills and farms where he grew up, legitimate now he's rich, redeemed, staying in the Hotel Angelo, walking the old lands with his old friend Nuto. This is a climate more than a story. He might be staying in the hotel, he might buy a farm, for now he buys a penknife for a crippled boy. That could be me, he thought. Even with the leg. Not so much reading, more temperature-taking, making an even way of words through a troubled past.

Only on the second reading do I sense the geography of it, the different farms, the people who lived there, which vineyard had which grape, who lay with whom, and died of it. There is no future here, despite repeated attempts. 

I have been watching the BBC adaptation of Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of the first BBC series I ever watched (the other was The Golden Bowl). I was entranced by this time spent in a life I couldn't have known, but did. Long vistas of lowlands, a  presbyterian stoicism, fed on porridge in a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon, a wooden plough tilling the low land, a marriage an evening party and then there's the outdoor work to do next morning.

Once you've read that Cesare Pavese was not the creature that he wrote, he was not an illegitimate bastard but he felt like one, his nickname was not Eel, but he felt like an eel, he slithered around with none of the eel's savoir faire. He contemplated his old friend Nuto, who had not left, had not made his fortune but carried on.

He might have wound up as many do in this valley, growing like a plant, getting old like a woman or a goat, without knowing anything of life the other side of the Bormida, without ever stepping out of the routine of home and grape-picking and village fairs. But though he never travelled, something did happen for Nuto, a destiny of sorts — I mean this idea he has that you have to understand things, that the world is all wrong and it's in everyone's interest to change things.

BOYHOOD: inside the Coetzee chill

When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.

Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives? 

It takes a while. 

I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation. 

So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.

Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy. 

Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder.  ....

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

 It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.

MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

She stood among the circles and colours of Richard Gorman paintings, her flared patched jeans down to the floor, a brick-orange beanie, light hazel eyes, among light flicks at her phone her sweatshirt read Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Yes, I thought, I didn't have it written across my chest above my flared trousers when I was twenty, but it was my home ground.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turns out to be a song by Smashing Pumpkins. Infinite sadness, according to wiki-google-etc, is a form of anxiety that can be remedied with the right drugs. They are missing the art of sadness, the occupation of melancholy. Private, inarticulate, infinite sadness remains intact. That's the beauty of it. 

The Library at Castlemartyr Resort

The Library at Castlemartyr may be my home from home: there are six sprinklers and one smoke alarm in the ceiling, the sofa fabric is fifties green and pale sateen, the flowers are white carnation with baby breath, one flask per table.

I had saved The Pole for our stay at Castlemartyr. J.M. Coetzee, in portrait as in pages, is forbidding, and so is the narrative; we ease into it, unwillingly at first. We accompany Mr Coetzee's gradual acceptance of the story he tells, his easing into it by numbering short paragraphs, then longer pages, till the numbers are no different from chapter headings, and the chill gives way, at the last, to tenderness. 

The Pole is a Polish pianist with an unpronounceable name, a Chopin specialist. The woman is Beatriz. Likened, and not, to Dante's Beatrice.

Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker's wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come.

The books in the library at Castlemartyr are faded Dickens, book club Daphne du Maurier, a little Shakespeare (and I saw a mentor's Macbeth by a table in the hall) (our room has a softened hardback Irish  Civil War on the table under the tv). There are coffee table books about baking and preserving, a florid volume of Dangerous things for Boys. The only other person there that afternoon was a young man, recently a boy, at his laptop who never looked up. I wonder who had the task of fitting out The Library with books.

FOE DEFOE & COETZEE: one black beetle knows another

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera. 

There's a new mighty volume on Defoe. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. He would love that. He who was the eighteenth century in English letters, has engendered a handbook. I read a review in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fact Man'. 

Defoe could talk to Everybody in Their Own way. He had fingers in many pies, he'd been there, done, or knew someone who had, he was a one-man band, a self-publicist. JM Coetzee plugs into Daniel Foe, into Cruso, and Friday; into his reading. His writing literally emerges from his reading, as from Adam's rib. Gathering his own hinterland into the weave: South Africa, America, Australia. 

J.M. Coetzee looks the same in all his portraits, as if he were already a portrait, a portrait of a portrait, a stab at a portrait, three-quarter view, three-quarter darkness. Giving away less and less with every iteration.

After a swift read of the slender Foe, I started the only other Coetzee book I have, Elizabeth Costello; which I found painful. No, I kept thinking, no you don't have to do it this way. In fact, drop it all, do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

I did pass GO. I read the whole book, with a deepening revulsion/understanding. There are many ways of inhabiting books; one black beetle knows another; yes. Elizabeth Costello is a black beetle; as is J.M. Coetzee; as I am. But once we're there, in the black beetle arena of books and reading, we're as different as we can be. Difference is what makes us black beetles in the first place. We need to differentiate as we go along. Constructing and undermining with every move, every word.

the beautiful boy always dies

In the novels of James Purdy, the beautiful boy always dies. In The Nephew, his second novel, Cliff is missing in action in Korea, and then dead; in Malcolm, his first novel, the eponymous, very young man who waits on a bench, can only die after being claimed by a succession of eccentrics; in In a Shallow Grave, Daventry, with hair the colour of corn silk, and possibly otherworldly powers, is plastered to a pine tree in a hurricane.

Malcolm is his most famous novel, and the one I liked least. James Purdy has his device: a fifteen year old who lives in a hotel and waits on a bench for his father, perhaps, and meets a succession of people who all find him irresistible but have troubles of their own and sometimes he doesn't come first in their needs. He marries one of them (her third husband), and then dies, and for this reader it is more of a convenience than a climax. 

The Nephew is a small town novel. I have a soft spot for tales of small town life: somewhat suppressed and wistful older folk who are forced to learn secrets they'd rather not know, constantly adjusting to the shifts in the tone of neighbourhood life brought by each new revelation. 

In a Shallow Grave, a war veteran needs looking after, the beautiful boy is Potter Daventry, of mysterious, possibly violent past, he sees beyond the raw mulberry skin of Garnet Montrose until one is permanently attached to the other. Daventry dies and Garnet's skin returns to a more normal colour, beyond death, as if by transfer of atoms.

I read these three novels nine years ago. All at once. Some elusive writers you have to take hold of a few books at once. James Purdy is elusive. His books are full of applicants and supplicants, a shifting crowd of emigrants who always lose their centre; that's what always happens. The beautiful boy, hair the colour of cornsilk, will die instead of you. 

LOWLIFE TANGO: Damon Runyon and Nelson Algren

What am I doing with the pit of the year? Guys and Dolls set up several wet/windy/cold afternoons; a present from Gertie to my parents in 1958, a Broadway romp like Dickens on rollerskates; I missed it already when I finished it, but thought about talky books in general, and lives a long way from mine, in particular, like a writer whose name I couldn't remember at first, but, having decided to go along the bookshelf starting with A, I soon found: Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side.

To read Nelson Algren you have to drop your pitch and raise your game. Instead of Broadway, you have box car, flophouse, areaways, a low tight focus, painful syncopation of day to day progress, or not. Instead of Spanish John and Nicely Nicely Jones, you have Kitty Twist and Dove Linkhorn and Big Stingaree, Out Front and Natural Bug. They mill around Perdido Street in New Orleans, the summer of 1931, country boys and daddy-o's, waifs and strays and halfies, old Europe and self-made panders, looking for the next quarter, tenspot, C-note, querying everything.

'Give me animals, at least they know what they're doing. Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

Do you know about elephants, how they come on?' she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

If you'd stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you're saying,' the wool-tie sport suggested.

Well', the girl explained, 'I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk 'n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn't be no elephants.

'So what?'

'Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they're doing.'

Dove Linkhorn is our guide, barefoot, letterless — he has only reached B by the time he reaches New Orleans. He has a moment with Kitty Twist, 17 year-old runaway, in a playground.

Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.

'Just let me know when you've had enough, Red. I got all day.'

But his childhood had just begun and he hadn't had nearly enough.

'Catch me when I come down!' he warned her from the top of a chute.

And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck.

After more than two hundred pages Dove Linkhorn is studying M and N, with the help of Hallie Breedlove, ex- of Legless Schmidt. Nelson Algren goes the distance; his language is what we read. Sounds obvious, but but never more so than here. By the time Dove Linkhorn, or Red, or Tex, is reading, and listening, we have learned his language, and can read as he does.

Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody's pappy got entirely drownded. Full fathom five Thy father lies.

So when, fully literate, he is smashed by halfy Legless Schmidt, we are aghast.

'I like to get up close to accidents' Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove's broken mouth, that was trying to speak through swallowing blood.

Blind, Dove Lindhorn goes back to his village in Texas. 

This afternoon all my roof windows are closed by snow. 

 

I, Gombrowicz

 'A masterpiece of philosophical fiction' says one of the puffs on the back of Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz. Philosophical fiction may be the same as a concept novel: scenes bear ideas but not narratives, they veer about, clumsy as adolescence reimagined.

And now suddenly there appeared before me the possibility of a warm idyll in a spring I thought irretrievably ended, and disgust gave way to the marvellous appetite of these two young people. I wanted nothing more, I had had enough of this agony. I, a Polish writer, I, Gombrowicz, chased after this will-o'-the-wisp as a fish chases after its bait—

This is on page 31. From then on I was a detached reader. Happy to read lying down in front of the stove and detach some more. Doze. Read some more.

The open shutters disclosed a radiant morning with clouds racing over the bluish garden soaked in dew, and the low sun cast slanting rays which seemed to implicate everything in their slant—the house slanted, the trees slanted! Amusing! Most amusing and witty! The horizontal surfaces were vertical and the vertical surfaces slanting!

There is displaced male lust and fantasy, less subtle than Eric Rohmer's films, but I, Gombrowicz, I, Witold, writes out of 1940s Poland, nicely rendered for our era by wikipedia: The Germans wipe out Polish intellectuals in the territories incorporated into the Third Reich, as well as in the General Government, resettle hundreds of thousands of Poles, limit the rights of the Polish population, and lock Jews in ghettoes.

Maybe the wikipedia terseness is more appropriate than it knows. All novelistic communication in such an atmosphere has to seem false, at a constant remove, aggressively so even, and perhaps, once Gombrowicz had escaped Europe and gone to South America, the style remained with him: Pornographia is no less of a potboiler than The Possessed, which I read last week.

THE QUIVERING TOWEL

The Possessed is a potboiler, an unwilling gothic novel written by a European avant-garde writer; Witold Gombrowicz went to Argentina from Europe in 1939; he needed money: a quivering towel in the old kitchen, blue/black lips, like to like spreading like a virus, a crusty, withered, crazy prince in a castle; Signs, Treasure, Etc. Writing is restlessness. Everything in this narrative evades the narrative. Jack goes up the hill but he also goes down. A false novel, an infernal machine, said Sartre. Gombrowicz writes as he discards, discards as he writes. The Possessed is the sardonic tale of a rising tennis star, her coach, her fiancé, the castle down the road, the quivering towel, the old kitchen. A suggestion, fifty pages from the end of the book, is to declare war on the quivering towel, source of all evil. 

I have long loved what I called bad novels — by Mrs Henry Wood, Ouida, William Gerhardie, Kay Dick — all contentious — bad is always contentious. The Possessed is a bad novel. Is a bad novel a false novel, an infernal machine? Is all writing an infernal machine?

These are the layers of reading The Possessed, filling a glass with their variety, like layers of sand from the Holy Land.

We think the world of you, J.R. Ackerley

The last paragraph of We think the world of you is as poignant as a story gets. Evie the Alsatian dog holds the centre of the novel; she is the Tulip of My Dog Tulip, and the Queenie of J.R. Ackerley's life. He struggled with his human Ideal Friends; most of his humanity went to his dog, Queenie/Tulip/Evie, who was guardian of his solitude, for which he was grateful; it was what he wanted; or was it? What is about a novel that allows a writer to say more than he has in a memoir? The stretch of fiction, the stylising, the reducing or amalgamating, Ideal Friends, dogs, In-Laws, real or imagined, desired, or maybe not. This dog, Evie, takes jealous possession of his life.

Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity of contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no, yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about .... But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.

WHAT DO FOURTEEN YEAR-OLDS DREAM NOW

In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. She asked others about their dreams, and wrote them down. What we can't say, can emerge in dreams. 

I'm riveted. This is my territory. How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? Zadie Smith asks in a review of a new English edition of this book of dreams. Now, in our times, do people mistake control for comfort? Are they nesting in algorithms? Are social media sucking out the marrow of our attention? There is much talk from E. Musk about freedom of speech. What has happened to freedom of thought? The OED's word for this year (they add a word every year) is brainrot (from too much mindless screen time). What kind of dreams does brainrot give you?

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books ends her essay on The Third Reich of Dreams: the nightmares of a nation with an update: a talk she gave to 400 14 year-olds in Barcelona, ostensibly about fiction, but really they wanted to talk about social media. It was hard to get rid of slavery— it took riots, murder, changes in the law — the Third Reich needed world war two to bring it to an end. All you have to do to get rid of social media, she said to her young audience, is to look the other way.

Names:

Jhumpa Lahiri avoids names, of people, places, as if naming were owning or presuming more than she means to, more than she can.

I read Whereabouts and then Roman Stories, mostly at night, for company. Without names you set yourself a formal problem, how to fix people without naming them, how to write them into the reader's awareness, the writer's willingness. To say only just enough, and then move on. 

The art of fixing people in a story in order to think about them, and yourself, and to shape a story, is soporific and convivial in the middle of the night. 

Next day I think about the reticence, the strain of it: this is as close she can come to the people she writes about, lives among, perpetual foreigner, self-regarding as you're forced to be, as most of us are forced to be, while being off-hand, obedient, unexceptionable. 

I should note straightaway that P's parties took place every year at her house, on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon, during the mild winters we typically enjoy in this city.

We can take any amount of drama after that.  

The Blue Flower

I read The Blue Flower every few years and different things show through. This time I noticed the Bernhard, age six, also known as the angel of the family—his mother saw him as a page at the court of the Elector of Saxony—one of the younger brothers of Fritz von Hardenburg, German Romantic poet who chose to write as Novalis. The Bernhard has learned some powerful truths at a young age. After being reprimanded for going through a visitor's possessions, he calmly says at breakfast next day, 'In a republic there would be no possessions.' How does he know, age six?  Yesterday a friend said one of her brothers at the age of five declared at breakfast that he no longer believed in God. Sometimes children just know.

And parents know not what they have created. Especially at the end of the 18th century, when children were produced in quantity, and mostly did not survive into adulthood, let alone old age. Of Novalis' family most were dead before adulthood; Novalis died at 28. Mostly they died of consumption. Doctoring was very particular; one doctor believed in fresh air, exercise, sex and alcohol. Another believed that being alive was unnatural and that people needed opium to keep them calm and schnapps with wine to boost them, in order to achieve the kind of balance we call life on earth.

Fritz (Novalis) (Hardenburg) has started a poem, not in verse, called 'The Blue Flower'. He reads it to his friend Karoline (Justen), to whom he had given his entire confidence. She is pleased and confused. Soon Fritz meets twelve-year-old Sophie, his Wisdom, his Philosophy, friend of his spirit. He hires a painter to make a portrait of her but he fails, because, as he says, all creatures emit a question, and he could not hear Sophie's question.

The German view of university education was that it was best to attend as many universities as possible in order to learn fundamental questions about being alive, questions that one could continue to think about for the rest of one's life: 'The problem of a universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man'.

As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different of measurement.

Flight Without End, On the Road, Young Adam

Three novels about drifting, 1920s to 1950s, by Joseph Roth, Jack Kerouac and Alexander Trocchi. 

In Flight Without End, Franz Tunda, First Lieutenant in the Austrian army, is taken prisoner by the Russians, escapes, finds himself in Siberia where he stays for three years with a Pole who counted his words like pearls. Franz has a photograph sewn into his coat of his fiancée Irene who must be waiting for  him in Vienna. Way up in Siberia they do not hear that World War 1 has ended, and later this seems enviable. Franz leaves and travels west; he finds something like a wife in Baku; further west he is taken by the Red Army, prisoner or comrade much the same by then. He visits his brother in a town on the Rhine; no warmth here, nothing heimlich or gemütlich that he can bear; he hears that Irene has married and lives in Paris. He goes to Paris. When they finally meet she does not recognise him. 'No one in the world is as superfluous as he.' 

Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam came up this week in film versions. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty career around America, extravagant in their big jalopies, loose and louche behaviours flow as fast as they can think them up. Their freedom looks indulgent, restless, self-congratulatory. Proust, whose Swann's Way is often in the foreground of indoor scenes, looks indulgent too. 

Drifter Joe, in Young Adam, working the barges out of Glasgow, working all the women he meets, is determinedly indifferent, cold; drifting is the point of drifting. He watches his girlfriend drown in only her petticoat, knowing she couldn't swim. She is pregnant, of course. He dodges that and quits the country. In the next book he'll fetch up in New York on heroin. 

Franz Tunda is not able for the society to which he returns. He prefers Siberia and the companionship of the Siberian Pole, who'd come as a convict and settled of his own free will. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty see no society except their own. They haven't come back from a war. Young Adam is a nihilist; the only way is onwards and downwards. Joseph Roth's nineteen twenties is a richer, sadder landscape. Or so I find. According, maybe, to the principle that influential inner landscapes come from a generation earlier, not one's own. 

BONE INTO STONE

Bone into Stone, Jhumpa Lahiri's essay on translating Ovid, made me suddenly aware again of the enchanted zone of the text — Ovid's The Metamophoses is not a book, it's a text — such attention to the word is already a translation.

I like thinking this way. While the saga of the neighbours rolls on — we have brought in a 3-ton digger — where would I go but to the page? Metamorphosis. Changing, turning, erring, stumbling. The stone, the living, infinitely flexible stone, the one you trip over, the one that makes you write. 

(At times I wonder if translation is tantamount to another language spreading, lava-like, over a pre-existing text, allowing it to live on in the very act of silencing it.)

Bone into Stone made me think of Bone the Dancer which I have been translating or wanting to translate into the person I now am. The difficulty, the endurance of re-reading it, moving it into the person I now am, wondering in turn who that is, the way you find it hard to see yourself in your own shoes.

I have translated bits of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and a short story by René Daumal. I have never translated myself. 

WHAT READING DOES (FOR ME)

I could be reading Jhumpa Lahiri for the second time in the middle of the night, if reading is to be in someone else's life. 

In the morning I'm reading/weeding among young birch trees, pulling out the strangely satisfying square roots of field woundwort, yellow nettle roots ripping through the upper earth, new goosegrass, already confident, nascent perky ivy. 

At the end of the day I'll read the New Yorker in the bath. How much writers' archives go for even while they're alive.

Reading is the model. 

The day aligns.

THICK AND THIN

The clocks have changed. Damp day. So-so mushroom foray after breakfast. Then the wilds of ryanair online for a while. For the rest of the daylight I read Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts, stopping a while after each short chapter — a walk, going to the supermarket, or the cafe, away on a trip, and home, the piazza, needing to hear a car go past in order to sleep. This is slim writing, low-key, less icy than Fleur Jaeggy, more bewildered but safe, somehow, in her city. 

In the bath I read Alexander Navalny, 2022 to 2024, in prison in the soviet arctic, calling out, sending hugs, reminding people not to be afraid. He shovels snow with a frozen wooden shovel. His only company on the cell block is an operatic psychotic who doesn't sleep. He knows he may well die here. 

Thick and thin reading at another turn of the year. The sky flushed red at dusk.

Aftereffects of reading Moby Dick

Anything I try to read after Moby Dick is awkward. Jon Fosse is very awkward, benumbed, northern. Machado de Assis, the essential stories, is from Brazil, so the air is thicker and the pages hold back with some unexpected turns and perfumes. And these are short pieces, a page or two, not more than fifty. Lakes and chasms, shards and shafts, moments. 

Moby Dick is six hundred pages. Ahab's inner life and Melville's across the four ocean meadows of the globe, the explanatory map at the back of the book, with its dotted line ending in shipwreck somewhere off Japan, all you need to know. The white whale triumphs. Too many whales died in order to light the words of politicians declaring their protection of living things. 

In Moby-Dick, Melville calls the ocean the"dark side of this earth" and he's right"  ...  "almost all the ocean is dark almost all of the time."

This afternoon I read Verlyn Klinkenborg, 'What the ocean holds' in The New York Review of Books. He sets up on a scale Melville would understand, the globe and its oceans, its heaving inner life. 

Billions of pounds of plastics and micro plastics and nano-plastics—smaller than the dust particles we breathe—are washing into the ocean every year, affecting nearly every aquatic species in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.

We are used to talking about global etc, but our speech is corrupted. It's possible, says Verlyn Klinkenborg  

that our capacity to adjust to almost any "new normal" may turn out, ironically, to be one of our greatest liabilities as a species..... it's now estimated that Earth's biosphere is "95 percent deep ocean". Think for a moment what that means: most of this planet's biosphere, as one scientist put it, "exists in the dark."

Like Ahab. Like most of us. 

MOBY DICK on the beach

I  read Moby Dick on the Ilha da Tavira, not as a sea person but as a woman displaced from her meadow and finding it, with interest, in Melville's language, his sousing in matter, in nature, and the mind. Chapters end with a thought more than a brink. The end of Chapter 70:

"Still ho! cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.

"Aye well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunderclouds swept aside from his brow. "That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. —Where away?"

"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!"

"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."

The Sperm Whale is a Platonian, says Melville, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. Ahab is madness maddened. Everything weighed in the scales of the New Testament. Ishmael needs more than a hundred pages to set out from Nantucket in the Pequod, as Tristram Shandy takes most of his book to be born. Captain Ahab is as unseen as Orson Welles lurking beneath postwar Vienna in The Third Man; Ishmael has to meet and become brothers with Queequog, the royal from an off-the-map south sea island, before the ship can sail.  

Before we meet Ahab we must experience killing whales, hauling them on board, cutting them up, barrelling the oil, we must encounter other whaling ships and their tales, the globe circled in search of a white whale, oceans as meadows, the soul fully stretched, Ahab's special lunacy storming his general sanity, and then ours.

The beach in October. Yes. Who's there and what are they thinking about as they lie there, or walk west, or east; what are they relieved of, what do they have to say, who is listening. A man called Paul has set up at the back of the beach, his enclosure, his base. Because it is a public place, he states his case about nudity. Others are encouraged. It's the end of the season, mosquitoes are out in calm spots. Ferries ply to and fro, a warship goes through, a yacht or two in the distance. 

To this day people are uncertain as the function of spermaceti, the substance in the whale's head that gave lighting oil and a base for unguents in the nineteenth century. One of the Pequod's crew nearly drowns in a whale's head, rescued by Queequog, royal, modest, throughout. Ishmael likes to think that the oil rises up through the ship's masts, union of whale and wood.

Chapter 94

A Squeeze of the Hand

.... As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their one; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow ....

 

Bartleby, Beckett & some former selves

The weave this week was Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, diverse landing places in the New Yorker, and my diary from 50 years ago, to say nothing of last night's dream. Francine Prose has published her account of 1974, A Personal History, and I have re-read mine for the same year— she is the same age as me, Brooklyn-jewish as I am Nowhere-jewish. Francine Prose lived out the politics of the counterculture; I moved to Ireland, ate the evening light and wanted to tell everything, which may have been a passion born of displacement, or just the age I was at, soused in language, and the new solitude of an unfamiliar place. 

Reading Bartleby was like home. The gentle language of refusal. I prefer not to. Those who prefer not to do not prosper and not prospering is what they prefer. What's hypnotic about Bartleby is this gentle, melancholic space. You land there and it's so much quieter than refusing cookies on a website; it isn't countercultural, it isn't a protest, Bartleby enters the central void, or great peace, not against anything, nor for anything either, mildly dismissing every intervention, up to and including his own life.

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

THE HONEY SIEGE

From the bedroom bookshelves, dawn blossom plucked late night, I took The Honey Siege by Gil Buhet, Penguin 1958. A bunch of 13 year-olds protest their innocence by occupying the Bastide, drawing up the long-static drawbridge and holding out. They hadn't stolen honey from the schoolmaster's hives, it was the transfer of power, real or imagined, from the schoolmaster, the mayor, the innkeeper and other parental units, to their sons. Blood and Freedom. Abracadabra. The future was theirs. This is a Truffaut delinquency, with shades of Swallows and Amazons. Rebellion and rightfulness. 

I finished The Honey Siege up at the reservoir on the last day of summer — the only day of summer? The sons of Casteilcorbon know their history, they have been well-tutored and they win the day. The honey siege ends peacefully, the real thief, Maria the slavey, is now one of their number as they readjust to town life and consider piracy for the next summer. 

STARTLING SANDWICH

Mixed reading diet, a startling sandwich of a lost gay novel from 1928 and a much lauded Norwegian trilogy from 2014. 

In my diary from September 14th 1974, two weeks into Ireland and a touch of mania already setting in, loneliness and consequent plunder of all resources, I read a novel I have never seen since, To Kiss the Crocodile. How come in all this time I have never noticed a novel on my shelves with a title like that? I looked up across the room to the newly rearranged bookshelves under the windows. A black volume, with the spine missing. Yes. Soft inlaid paper, 1928. To Kiss the Crocodile, a novel by Ernest Milton, actor, well-received interpretations of Hamlet etc, I learned on wiki, but there was no mention of a novel he wrote. No mention either of a newly transplanted, newly invented french lecturer, lodged with her books and music in the annexe of an early Victorian villa looking out on Cork Harbour reading it straight through in a day and wondering if she'd forgotten something, a whole human being, perhaps, herself?

Ernest Milton is prey to what he can't say, which gives rise to a long, repetitive, desperate, tumultuous, frozen novel. In 2024 I read it fast, impatient and sympathetic, both. My impatience, and my sympathy, is not only with Ernest Milton, it is also with my younger self who bought the book in the first place. 

Jon Fosse writes an elemental tale out of his Nordic inheritance, his sureness. Like Tarjei Vesaas, he knows a tiny village by a fjord, isolated people, small, intense compass: a cottage, a boat, the glittering fjord, fiddle playing, floating with the music, with hunger, expedience, and the still form of the story through several generations around which he'll ply his language. 

Between the elemental and the tumultuous in a fine week in September. 

A DIARY UNNERVED

I have been reading my diary from 1974, when I first came to Ireland. I had a better pen back then, the nib medium oblique, the diary octavo, ruled feint. I was staying in the annexe at Glenmore, outside Cobh, with a soft and worthy family, Swantons, in their longtime place, writing lectures about French poets I didn't like, waiting for the rush of light at the end of the day, the start of teaching, the next encounter, and the foghorn across the harbour. I picked up hitchhikers, talked, walked, drove about, all eyes, ears and interiority, picked watercress and carragheen along the beach, ate windfall apples. 

A diary is a fine place to build a life. Reading myself fifty years ago I can see that. I can see who I was and who I still am. In the same country. Such a distance between Glenmore, outside Cobh, in Cork Harbour, and Inniscarra, where I went next, where I still am. 

On Sunday I went to Glenmore to mark the anniversary, I walked along the beach and up the grassy path to the house. As with the fortieth anniversary, ten years ago, there was no one there. I knocked and rang defunct doorbells, noticed the geraniums and the windfalls, apples and pears, on a table outside. Went back down to the beach and had some bengal spice tea from my flask. It was a flat grey day. A sharp wind off the refineries. Ten years ago there were dead fish; I read Virginia Woolf and remembered the rowboat that used to be on the beach. 

This time there was a pale pink fleece dropped on the grassy path up. I never fail to be moved by the path up from the stony beach, the mowed grass, the hydrangeas, the stone steps up to the terrace in front of the house. Just as my friend Annette said that my mother's kitchen was the model for hers, perhaps the setting of the Swanton house was the model for Inniscarra, though there is no sea, no harbour, here, I have wanted to find the mean level of this side of the hill, to plant it as it deserves, as we all deserve.

THE END OF AUGUST

In a viewing room in Culver City, Los Angeles, May 1981, on a very comfortable private sofa, I watched a freshly-minted movie, The End of August: flawless sky, long sand, soft horizon, parasol framing the face, the sea, the end of August pristine for all time. From the novel by Kate Chopin, which I haven't read. The film has also vanished from sight. The beach remains.

My Sebald summer had interludes of Norman Maclean and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as well as The New Yorker and Hortus. P was surprised I liked Norman Maclean. Sometimes an action tale, language as muscular as logging, as delicate as fly-fishing, so hard-won, is what the reading body needs.

I'm nearing the end of Austerlitz up at the pond. Watching bumblebees work the scabious. The end of August in Inniscarra. Wind from the southeast, a yapping dog and a truck permanently reversing. I'm learning the art of letting things slide off a duck's back, and sleeping better.

Austerlitz is as compelling as your own past, or anyone's, half-restored, half-escaped. I can't read too much at a time, then I have to turn away and watch a spider repair the damage I did to its web when I sat down. 

Since I was twenty I have tried to confirm with patient handiwork, as Sebald says in the introduction to A Place in the Country, my peculiar position, his peculiar position, theirs, ours, wanting to write all the time, keeping a diary, following a route, taking photographs, most of which deepen rather than clarify. 'There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.'

Perhaps it would be better simply to set down .... a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.

CONTES CRUELS

On my former teaching shelves, I found a battered french book with no back and a detached front cover, frayed & browning pages, soft as an animal. The plays of Corneille. I'll never read that again. I threw it in the stove basket and, a day or two later, thought I'd put it in the fire, looked at the opening pages, it wasn't Corneille at all, it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, friend of Mallarmé, his NOUVEAUX CONTES CRUELS et PROPOS D'AU DELA, and a few fragments inédits. Soft chalky pages are seductive. French publishing a hundred years ago followed the aesthete, the effete, as now the pronoun sensitive. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam — I don't know what his friends called him — was a creature of his own decline. La vieille France, la France profonde, has a network, a spider's web, of decaying aristocracy, and he was one such, working his way out of reality as much as he could. Vivre, les serviteurs le feront pour nous.  

Sara said the other night that she liked to pack an adventure bag when she was young, which would have included a pair of binoculars and a book with soft pages she took from her grandmother's shelves. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam would garnish an adventure bag, no trouble. You could stop and read it under an apple tree somewhere.

THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE

Major turnout of my room throws up all kinds of jiggery-jaggery. THE GOOD HORSE GUIDE has been hiding among paper samples for the past few decades. Written by my sister, Ruth Mazet, whose life was more or less dedicated to horses. Her woe to the end of her life was that despite her best efforts, horses weren't enough. 

She makes abundant use of capital letters and letters in bold, the font is large and paper shiny. She always refers to the horse as he/him. I can hear her voice, and our mother's, their insistence when they were sure, which was often, plus the defiance to know otherwise. With barely a flick of the reins I can read it as the good Ruth guide. How much of her life, from foalhood to maturity, channelled through animals, is here, as if in reverse, in another language, another life.

With all the will in the world, things can, and often do, go wrong. If not understood and handled correctly, problem behaviour will usually go from bad to worse, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Here then, is a short summary of the most common problems, why they happen and what to do about them.

Oh! Oh! Oh! 

I have never googled my sister before. She wrote another book: My Horse Rears: Curing Problem Behaviour in Horses With Kindness and Consideration. And she had a website, horse-talk. Not much reading leaves me speechless, but this did.

DESERT & RIVER, men in their landscape

William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf has on the front cover a photograph of a pair of pugilists on shiny wet ground. A tale of a friendship that ends in a desert. Lymie Peters and Spud Latham, the athlete and the devout, thoughtful observer, each faithful in their own way, they complement each other until one day the egg has broken and they don't. Sally Forbes brings this about. 

The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense out of their lives.

Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It has on the front cover Brad Pitt on a rock casting a cursive loop over a tree-lit river. I have liked the phrase of his title for many years. I didn't know how he came by it, and didn't wonder enough to read the book, until now. I bought a copy from a bookshop in Jena, which arrived yesterday, and I read the title story yesterday and today, up at the pond and in the middle of the night. It's a thickly printed pocket book from 1992. The fly fisherman does not know the river, he becomes the river, and he becomes the river by knowing how the river was made, and knowing that it was made with fishermen in mind. 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Time Will Darken It

William Maxwell turns out to be the writer of the moment (reading desires are so precise sometimes); his carefulness, sense of justice, the way his chapters are born out of and interleave with each other, the distance in time, all this enfolds me, especially lying on the sofa in the new(ish) room with new eye(s), the cat on my feet, asleep, I do not want for anything except the summer I have agreed, for the afternoon, to forget.

Time Will Darken It was published in 1948, set in 1912, in a family house with a fractured couple just before a party, hairline cracks perhaps. Southern cousins come to stay, and a house, a marriage, a child, and myriad other substrates, are stirred to breaking point. The title is a quote from a 17th century painting manual. These sharp colours, sharp emotions, fulsome yet restrained dramas that skirt tragedy, they will darken. As certain books darken, deepen. Others, like one we were given recently and another that was left in the cabin, Francis Bacon's Nanny and Yellowface, will not. Francis Bacon darkens, but not an account of him by a reimagined nanny a hundred years later. I doubt the yellowface rant will darken either, it will simply deliquesce, like a slug under salt.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW

I was looking along the living room shelves, newly brightened, for some clear short tale for late july, and chose So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which I read up at the pond, between dunking in the dark water and maybe pulling out some water soldiers and bogbean and wondering why on earth, precisely, Florrie Heelan has to move his fields around so often with heavy machinery on quiet days in summer. William Maxwell is farmland/small town America, his Illinois rural and foreboding, accepting and at the same time evading. Acceptance a kind of evasion in its own right. 

My copy has pencil marks beside passages I liked the last time or the time before that. I find my former selves, old influences that have permeated, by now, and become part of my fabric. The child who says, So Long, See You Tomorrow, to his friend, is there on my current meadow, along with the lost furniture of his childhood, sofas, mahogany tables, pictures, big square books full of photographs that he knew by heart, that his fingers had absently traced.

If they hadn't disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, so Ortega Y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.

 

READING IN A BROODY SUMMER

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

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

Sebald & Bone the Dancer

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

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

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

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

SCHERRY SHI

There's an election in your country today, said M. with a certain sharpness.

It isn't my country, I said, and you can't decide for me. 

You're British and you always will be, she went on.

No, I never felt British. My country is the place where I've dug and planted. Where I've nested. 

Scherry Shi was born in China, lives in London, her parents are in New Zealand; she is thinking about these things in a more immediate way than I am. You could see it in the way she moved between the tables at the book fair where we met her.  She made a small book called departure, of softened photographs and some text. Departure /from air /from soil /from water

...  I could not stop thinking of my homes, which I depart from, which I return to, of those within me, of those away from me; of those above the earth, of those on the ground.

Home is where I was, where I am and where I may be in the future.

Reading Sebald in bed, talking to M in the morning, working in the veg plot in the afternoon, looking at Scherry Shi's book in the evening.