Platonov, The Foundation Pit

Platonov's The Foundation Pit is a violent, disturbing read. The violence is embedded in the language, not in the action. Having laboured and lying down, often not getting up again, are the dominant modes. Consciousness and the state are totalitarian. There is talk of socialised property and liquidation of illiteracy. The larger the words the emptier the minds of those who try to rest, the more excruciated their grasp on what is happening to them. Humans and their being in the world are constantly threatened if not already severed.

The difference between reading Platonov and reading Kafka or Beckett is that Platonov's creatures flail and sink inside a distinct historical reality. However little the reader might know about Stalin's Russia, the fact of it is there. Post-truth. Pre-truth. During truth.

I read The Foundation Pit badly, often in the middle of the night. Perhaps you have to read it badly, in short bursts, when the reading of the night before has all but vanished, as for Platonov's creatures the day before has all but vanished, along with the day to come. This is despair, after all, Russian despair. Everything vast. And hopeless. The foundation pit is a graveyard. A collective farm is a collection of bones. Barren hens quietly groan in people's arms.

Platonov's creatures feel at home as long as they can see limits of any kind, any form of endgame, any depth of absurdity. Some of my psyche feeds on this, I have to conclude. I might sleep better for it, and even if I don't, there'll be comfort and reflection in the wakefulness, the extenuated humour.

But why, Nikita, do the fields lie there so boringly? Is there really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there's a five-year plan?

Rilke, Duino Elegies

I bought a different translation of the Duino Elegies. As with a new recording of Beethoven late quartets, I was nervous and curious as I began. My original copy, bought when I was a student, is the dual language JB Leishman & Stephen Spender translation, hardcover, with nearly intact dust jacket, Hogarth Press, soft chalky paper, comfortable layout. The new book is a Vintage paperback, thin rough paper, pinched layout, over inked, also dual language, with translation and editing by Stephen Mitchell.

The new recordings of Beethoven (the Takacs quartet) I have been listening to this winter have easily overtaken the old ones, though I notice quieter transitions or unusual accents. Old involvement with a recording (the Budapest quartet), old investment in quality of sound with ambient associations, holds from one recording to another.

Not so on the page. In visceral, childish fashion I only want these words on this paper. I want my pencil marks, confirmation of my innerness then, the most reliable crux of life.  In order to read the Duino Elegies I have to be able to turn into the person I was when I first read them, and for that I need the paper, the marks, the page layout, the deep W at the start of the first elegy.

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength
of his
stronger existence. For Beauty's nothing
but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note
of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there
we can make use of? Not angels, not men;
and even the noticing beasts are aware
that we don't feel very securely at home
in this interpreted world.

I like the awkwardness and sometimes impermeability of this translation. I want to be as luxuriously bemused as I was when I was 22. Deep inside what I didn't understand, I did understand.

I heard on the radio this morning that ten percent of people in the UK do not have a book in their house. Ninety percent have a cook book or a self help or a manual or a novel. No mention of a bible, not even for smashing a ganglion.

Philip K. Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

The front cover of my copy of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland has faded to shades of light- and mid-blue, the colours of a lost morning. The reds are the first to go in colour printing. The Pontiac, if it's not a Chevy, on the front cover should be red, the office and its sign should be cerise. No champagne hour chez Philip K Dick. Everyone is too sad and unsuccessful, the view too veiled, too confused.

The last few chapters are best read in the bath, where a general softening of outlook allows Humpty Dumpty and his acquaintance fall down and pick themselves up over and over again, till by the last page you know this does not stop, a used car lot closes and another opens up, some die and some relocate, a record company called Teach is always looking for a new motif.

This is like Dashiell Hammett without the latent heroism. His detectives are laconic but they are heroes. Chez Philip K Dick, our used car salesman, our garage mechanic, our record company, our wives (who are Greek if not educated), strain for some kind of buoyancy. No heroes. No resolution. Prose is discarded talk. Plot is obfusc and fickle. Death tidier than most other states.

The used car salesman and the garage mechanic have lost all certainty of understanding the world in which they try to make their way, butting into obstacles that look like opportunity. They acknowledge no code of behaviour, no code at all, except, without conviction, a vaguely self-serving behaviour. If you make the right decision you'll probably die before you know it.

I don't get on well with Philip K Dick's science fiction. I find it hard enough to consider the world as it is, without taking on the world as it might have been. I have no room for imagined horrors. The novels contemporaneous with his Bay Area, Marin County, Sonoma/Petaluma experience I enjoy. They are discomfiting as Platonov's Central Asia or Walser's Middle Europe, if less poignant, or poignant without poetry, or rejecting the comfort that poignancy might bring.

The puff on the back cover from the Times Literary Supplement of the 80s includes words like Nescience and Anomie, which look quaint in today's strictly easy-peasy strain of enthusiasm. When my fellow students were reading Durkheim, Marx and Weber, I was reading Rimbaud, Rilke and Virginia Woolf. Anomie is a likeable word, secretive, detached yet warm, redolent of plant life, light winds, secure alienation. Nescience sounds like something George Clooney could sell.

John Cage's diary up at the pond

Reading John Cage's diary does not preempt cleaning out and patching the pond, which is what we did today.

Diary: How to
Improve the World (you will
Only Make Matters Worse)

Up at the pond, we pull out our parrot weed and limit our bogbean, we squeeze out our Tec 7 onto prepared ovals of black plastic and cover over holes caused by, perhaps, slipping a coracle into the pond and pulling it out, or by shifting of substrate, revealing of small stones cracked into this shape by ancient fires, and rubbing of black plastic against same, we sharpen our awareness as to the limitations of our efforts. We might just as well, like John Cage, pluck our patches from our local beyond, juxtapose our bogbean prunings on the compost heap like cavaliers on holiday, throw muddy great diving beetles over the fence, leave this year's frogs back into the slime if that's where they want to go.

Old reasons for doing things no
longer exist. (Sleep whenever/ Your
work goes on being done. You and it no
longer have a means of separation.)

Some kinds of reading—of the pond and John Cage—meet and draw breath. What is a very small frog doing out and about at this time of year? Older bullfrogs are nearly ready for the season of singing and procreation. We pondworkers are entirely superfluous. With our waterlilies and our management and even our good will.

Do nothing for one reason only. Think
it with respect to a large number of
other reasons, preferably reasons
that seem contradictory.

A small spider climbing between the page and the desk light. John Cage would like that. Covert operations of chance and nature. The need for a skein to an upper level, and a quick escape back down. Hanging in the balance when I open the window for a taste of night air alongside Mozart (played by Mitsuko Uchida).

The
monks take turns: one of them reads out
loud while the others are eating.
They call it "the greater silence."

Henry Green, Party Going

Henry Green's Party Going (the gathering prior to departure rather than the habit of going to parties) revolves around a London station in a fog so dense a pigeon flew into a balustrade and fell down dead in front of a Miss Fellowes, who, wondering about fleas, washed it, wrapped it in brown paper and carried it to the rendezvous.

Henry Green avoids the definite article. He avoids the departure. He swirls with that fog inside and outside a London station. By page thirty-nine everyone is there, though people come and go, and some may not have come across others yet. This, says our narrator, was the beginning of a time for our party.

A time of double-postmarked letters, and divine tea and crumpets. As well as a nervousness—this was late nineteen thirties—fog went far beyond this London station, an old-fashioned station where travel was momentous, people could gather or fail to gather for hours on end, waiting for a boat train, for any train at all, piles of luggage around them. While you wait you might open a case.

If she had no memory for words she could always tell what she had worn each time she met him. Turning over her clothes as they had been packed she was turning over days. 

The station is thronging with travellers who are not travelling. Everyone, says our narrator, looks as if they've had enough. There's a blankness punctuated by tiny satisfactions—when going to sit by a bar was an idea—crossing the Channel in the company of other people was an idea too, if there were any trains.

Read a chapter of this supple disquiet in the middle of the night, reader, traveller, old thing, and you're made, like a mobster, like a nannie, you're swirling with your people in a fog of your own making.

Reading my address book

For the pit of the year, south of one storm, north or west of many others, I have been reading my address book at the kitchen table, The New Yorker in front of the stove, Hortus in the bath, and at my desk I have read and reread and rearranged the 20-word summaries of 9 o'clock movies typed out with a view to reading and re-reading and rearranging and understanding what's with these zombies, parasites, these demons, these aliens who are taking over, like predator, like prey, at 9 o'clock on a channel near you.

If everything we dream is us, so is every ravenous zombie, parasite, demon, alien. Every imminent invasion has already taken place and continues to take place all around us. We live in the anthropocene. A wafer of destruction on top of eras of consolidation. Have we always felt this perilous?

As long as we've been saying so. As long as we've been watching movies.

Pardon Edward Snowden, Joseph O'Neill

A wet night in December and Mahler songs sung by Janet Baker bring a line or two of a Joseph O'Neill story into literal relief. 'Pardon Edward Snowden' is ridiculously of the moment; as well as the petition, or poetition, to pardon Edward Snowden, and Bob Dylan's Nobel prize, there's this perilous poet confession: You become aware that what you're doing is almost nothing. That it's just a few atoms away from nothing.

Read that in the bath and you have your night's sleep in hand.

Float, Anne Carson

Float is 'a collection of twenty-two chapbooks whose order is unfixed and whose topics are various. Reading can be freefall'. This assembly of a book corresponds to a dream sense of what it is to read, to allow the loop and whirl of our attention, the sound of synapses scraping, the shape of a topic floating by.

Whatever the sequence of pages, the lure of exposition, it is pleasing and homely to read as your attention allows. Now and then you stop in your tracks. Other times you know you've lost it—through ignorance, exhaustion or absentmindedness—but you're pleased to be back in whenever you choose.

These pages can scatter across the floor, across whatever you've already read, what you know and what you don't know. I do not read or speak Greek, but I like the leisure of languages I do not understand, as well as others, like Latin, of which I have shards and some backbone.

Today I looked at Stacks, Possessive Used as Drink (Me), A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets, Contempts, How I like "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" by Gertrude Stein, and Cassandra Float Can. And when I say 'looked at' I mean 'read', as you read a stripped log or a forest floor. The reading of logs and forest floors is fine preparation for Anne Carson.

Float, Anne Carson

Anne Carson's Float box of dark blue leaflets, in the hour entre chien et loup, is an energiser. Our language is our brain our gut. Our nine o'clock movie. Read it as it falls. The staples are dark blue. Like the sky entre chien et loup. 

There is great liberty at work in a box of disparate leaflets. Today's leaflet was called Candor. I worked in the vegetable plot then came and read about Helen who sprinkled contests into the cloth she wove. Candor—my Preceptor—is the only wile (Emily Dickinson).

Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name. (Anne Carson.)

Robert Walser at 3 a.m. John Cage at 3 p.m.

Robert Walser is good at 3 a.m. Estranged and joyous.
John Cage's diary, 3 p.m. A snatch in the afternoon.
Everything we come across is to the point.
This is how we configure a day.
A night.

My family's origins, Isaac Babel

As soon as I read anything that smacks of my family's origins, I wriggle or turn away. In the middle of last night, awake at an even more ludicrous hour than usual, I read one of the Odessa stories by Isaac Babel and suddenly saw what I was reading: between Dashiell Hammett and my grandparents. I have been ill lately. My defences are lowered. I couldn't read Babel or his like while my parents were alive. Three of their parents came from north-east of Odessa, Bessarabia, as Babel calls it, as I did before I called it Russia, or Romania, or Moldova.

The name, elusive as Bessarabia/Romania/Moldova, is everything. If Odessa is a summary of whatever I wriggle from, so be it. I was pleased once to be described by a fellow jew as 'one of the Odessa crowd'.

In its tribal regalia, Odessa defeats me. I have no aptitude for the dense colours of these stories. Quickly I feel overwhelmed by rich tapestries of people strutting their noms de guerre. Social fabric I don't know how to weave, how to believe. I wriggle and turn away. Glimpses are all I can manage. I prefer Joseph Roth's Job: internal, uncomprehending, bottomlessly sad, engaged with a room and its outside, a family—if that—and its fragility.

I am happy to learn that in Odessa there were kefir makers, and that Bessarabia was a lush place with wine that smelled of sun and bedbugs. And I am always pleased to see the Yiddish term of endearment, bubbeleh, on the page. Babel's Odessa, up to almost including the pogrom, is linguistically riotous, seductive and vivid. Boris Dralyuk, the Pushkin Press translator, grew up there.

This language has lain mostly undisturbed all my life, just beneath my awareness; and my will. Inflections, inversions, a tone of complaint and triumph, a patois I could not accept as my father would have wanted. I had to invent my own. That was, and is still, the thing.

Job, The Story of a Simple Man, Joseph Roth

Job, The Story of a Simple Man, by Joseph Roth

Why do I need the unshed tears of this Roth creature in his Russian village, in New York? My predecessors are not my own. Or they are. Crouched by the stove.

Roth's boss at the Frankfurter Zeitung said that the sadder Roth was the better he wrote. Job was written in 1930, which was a sad time in general in Europe. Like now.

Do other readers like to take a rest in the sadness of long ago? Or would they rather raise their voices at the iniquities of now? Are these two sides of the same coin?

Sadness is slower than anger, that's all I know. Wind in the aspens, for some time before the leaves fall. Last leaves, last prayers. I have never prayed, I can say.

If sadness and anger are two sides of the same, the same, coin, then we are all closer than we think. If sadness is godless prayer. Then I have prayed.

Many pages into Google, Job is ancient poetry and sadness, not employment. Google is one reliable assessor of where we stand. Where we float.

One-Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka

One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

I started reading before a trip to London and finished when I came back, by which time our autumnal eco-patch and any sympathetic reading I might do in that direction were rendered even more poignant by the disastrous turn in American politics. Behind such noisy manipulation it's hard to hear yourself think.

Autumn sunlight through
such leaves as remain a sad—
ness unrequited

Fukuoka did not deviate from his way of farming, or his way of living, which were one and the same: no ploughing, no fertilising, no machines at all, growing crops as wild plants among other wild plants, living off his produce, knowing his trees and his plants, buying only soy sauce and vegetable oil; no wonder he lived to the age of 95.

Looming behind such lucidity and humaneness, is the agro-petro-chemical dependency machine that makes the farmer busier, the CEOs richer and the politics noisier. Better to have zero chemicals, zero machinery, zero economic growth and a population of 100% farmers who, in the slack winter season have the leisure to write haikus, says Fukuoka. Under 5% of the Irish population are farmers. No statistics on how many write haikus, or sonnets.

People are the way their land and air is, as Gertrude Stein said.

John Hutchinson, The Tree

John Hutchinson's The Tree pauses on note after note that resonates with me. Together they sound a diapason I don't want to forget.  Quietness. Wilderness. Vulnerability. Undifferentiated emptiness. And the ten thousand things that arise spontaneously from emptiness. A healthy wilderness of mind.

We are, as John Hutchinson says, culturally so averse to quiet.

This book is a goodbye to directing a gallery in Dublin and a hallo to whatever form of withdrawal the author might choose, whatever essay in idleness turns out to be his, on whatever mountain top. His last chapter is on Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution.

Maybe John Hutchinson's withdrawal from the gallery will involve the kind of farming that can coexist with the understanding that in this world there is nothing at all.

Well, there is Schubert.

News from Nowhere, William Morris, Road Books

It is one thing to read News from Nowhere on holiday in Portugal, another to read it at home and interrogate your own reading with a view to creating a book. Leonard Cohen could take ten years to write a song. Bob Dylan was closer to ten minutes. We took about two weeks.

My sympathies are with utopia, with nowhere. I can relate to yearning. I am all for idealism. If you can't dream ahead what's the point of walking? As William Morris makes his way up the Thames in his post-Revolution utopian reverie, I can follow.

Conversations about utopia have plenty of brick walls and blind alleys, many a gaping void. It's a question of how long you can suspend disbelief. How much you desire. A question of who you are. For whatever reason. And there are always volumes of reasons.

William Morris's News from Nowhere is poignant in its excess. I want him to describe his ideal society, after the revolution, I lament its unreality. For him in 1890 as for us in 2016.

Out of these thoughts, these considerations, came this book.

News from Nowhere in Tavira

News from Nowhere by William Morris, a utopian romance first published in 1890, is a defiant choice of reading for a holiday that starts on a ryanair flight. I am in row one in front of a two year-old screaming No to everything, and beside a plump woman whose breasts quiver as we go through turbulence. On the seat panel in front of us we read instructions for infant flotation devices and emergency landings of several kinds.

I read most of News from Nowhere on the beach in Tavira, sailing between recliners out to the open sea, half Atlantic, half Mediterranean. At home I would listen to a Mozart piano concerto. In creating his utopia, William Morris remembered his childhood in rural Walthamstow Chingford Woodford and Epping, where, in different mode, my earliest years also were spent, all meadow and haymaking and happiness. His, that is. In mine, there were lurking men in Epping Forest; you did not wander there, you read fairy tales, avoiding some, waiting for the penultimate upsurge when you'd be safe. William Morris was safe; or he badly wanted to be. He wanted an epoch of rest in his head, and he placed it in the 21st century.

And here we are in October, 2016, in Portugal, finding our view, getting used to our neighbours, overhearing their conversations. On the beach your neighbours are your society, but you're also going up the Thames with William Morris, from meadow to cottage to harvest, your idealism stretched but not under strain. 'Here I am loving you and you haven't learned a fucking thing', my neighbour (leopardskin bikini bottom and gold hoop earrings) is saying over a mojito and pringles and lover boy.

News from Nowhere comes from Ilha da Tavira, for now, from the beach on the Ria Formosa, sandbank of the gods, a holiday not a utopia. A utopia is when everyone agrees. The water is better far than the water of my childhood, glassy and warm, a caress not a challenge. And lover boy, unchastened, did sing his way back into favour.

My mother's brother Phil, with another chemist friend published Money Must Go in 1943. I have idealism in my veins. What is flowing in your veins isn't yours until you have entirely reconstructed it. Until you have read around it and gone in swimming.

My favourite chapter of News from Nowhere is about nine lines long: Concerning Politics.

Said I: 'How do you manage with politics?'
     Said Hammond, smiling: '…I will answer your question briefly by saying that we are very well off as to politics, —because we have none.'

'We need people like you to remind us what we're working towards,' a politico said to me when I was about twenty-five, which was obscure and warming, kinder than my earlier sense of myself vis-à-vis the Revolution (first in line for the firing squad). Mao's little red book had no poetry. I'd better keep my mouth shut.

1 Fifth Avenue, 1980s

In a New York bar (1 Fifth Avenue) in the early eighties, I met a young Cuban who was looking at his future in Arizona, his lone ecstatic house with a wall of screens so he could watch several films at once, and a machine that would read books for him and tell him what he needed to know. His preferred face—serious, downward, withdrawn, nearly petulant—he produced as needed. This was the face the machine would read to know what he needed to know.

News From Nowhere by William Morris, 1890. Money Must Go: see the world from a new angle by Philoren, 1943. Ruskin, passim. Marx, Blake, Keats, Yeats, Hesiod and Catullus. Kafka, throughout, for his upside down handbook to self-regard in the machine age.

This is what I would like the machine to read off my preferred face today. No pleading notes as yet. Naivete still possible. A cross of beauty, nature, despair and impossibilism. Money Must Go. There are always new angles. Philoren (pseudonym of two chemists) regrets the innocence of earlier idealists. We will always regret lost innocence, but the news from nowhere according to William Morris is full of hope. That's the advantage of literature. Write it and it's yours, for a while.

Calder and Boyars, New Writers 1971, John Donovan

Every book has a pedigree. Some books are more pedigree than book. I have been reading a novella by John Donovan, who was a neighbour and friend of my parents when I was growing up. When I was 17 he was 32, a wind from other planets blowing in Maldon, Essex; I first had couscous in his house, for example. We had first read and he second, of last week's New Statesman (?) from the library (at the end of the week they gave them away). He came on all the Ban the Bomb marches; he looked after the bric-à-brac stall at CND jumble sales in the Quaker meeting house (I did the book stall), and went to WEA lectures there, which may have been where he and my parents met. They had a troubled education in common, a desire to understand and to protest injustice and their horror. I didn't know he wrote; I knew he taught art. Whenever he came round I seemed to be washing my hair, he said.

In 1971 he published Anne in a Calder and Boyars new writers volume. His expression on the cover photo is intense, concerned, a slight frown, three-quarter view: everything matters. I took the book from my parents' house after my father died a few years ago; I have also had on my shelves for as long as I can remember, The Worst Journey in the World, whose flyleaf is inscribed with a large mid-blue italic signature: Donovan. Now I learn that John Donovan died last year.

When I read him now I retrieve a fresh calque of my 16 or 17 year-old self. There was John Donovan, walking along the Prom in Maldon, as I was around the same time, flailing about in doubts and desperate distances, as I did, embedding them in everything he saw, as I did. I was writing my diary and he was writing a novella, if he called it that, if he called it anything, if he could extract from the morass of everyday life what happened with Anne. Did she go on Ban the Bomb marches, or was this a girl of a different ilk? Why did he feel guilty? So responsible yet unclear? A difficult relationship to everyday life. In fact no such thing as the everyday. Every thought up for knocking down.

— Why? Harmless enough in itself. Anyway it's preferable to feeling nothing at all isn't it? A quick switch back to the horror of all that makes such dull moments seem not merely acceptable but positively good and desirable, however much the innocent over-sensitive part of oneself protests against it.

Had he missed reality altogether? Had I? Anne is made of burials and silences, hesitation and frustration. Many sentences stop before they've started. There is no explanation, no, nothing that will hold, only openings. Fragments and riffs. Opening one discussion, one philosophy, after another, and then stopping, picking up the everyday, loose hay spread around Platform Nine, the virtue of the Blenheim Orange apple.

'—"justify" eh? That's got a nice sort of something about it. "justify"…'
What would they be using a word like that for nowadays Bert?''
I've no idea Jack.'

Anne Carson, Clarice Lispector, Elizabeth Strout

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you.

So says Anne Carson. Fellow of Clarice Lispector. And Elizabeth Strout. I have been reading a crisp new hardback copy of My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout. In fact I read it once and started it again immediately. One immersion was not enough. Enough for what, I wonder, when I understood it on the first reading?

Elizabeth Strout and Clarice Lispector. They sit together in my head along with other forceful internal women who chose to write. Elizabeth Strout tentative/ apologetic/ unable/ determined, Clarice Lispector wilder, more stridently tender. If I can bring them together in my mind, the north-american/tender/careful mayflowerish Strout and the ukrainian/ jewish/ brazilian Lispector, they could surely sit together in a quiet place and talk over the desire for some view of truth, Elizabeth coming in on the transverse, Clarice, fiercer by far, preferring anecdote to narrative. Elizabeth ghosting a story obscurely hers, of terror and deprivation and much left unsaid.

Anne Carson, meanwhile, responding to a Roni Horn sculpture, covers the territory.

Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.

I read Anne Carson in the relaunched Penguin Modern Poets (orange) (three women).

Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. Nothing else exists. She takes her pen and writes on air some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

Daphne du Maurier, insomnia reading

From the bedroom bookshelves I read three Daphne du Maurier novels this week in some southeast asian weather followed by gales. Daphne du Maurier is good for insomnia and this has been a week of that. At three in the morning you can pick up where you left off at eleven at night, and, heartily manipulated by so much plot and character, maybe sleep.

The Parasites hauls you into the lives of three siblings—an actress, a musician and an artist—their Pappy (a singer)—and their Mama (a dancer). Overwrought and entrancing, their vicissitudes are compelling in a void, like Hello magazine or Netflix series. You can be interested if you feel like it. The story leaves no residue. The siblings are indeed parasites, crawling all over our attention. If only Daphne du Maurier could have desisted from calling the father Pappy. I choked every time, in sheer irritation, which, with luck, might hasten sleep.

My cousin Rachel is even more overwrought. Is Rachel a devil or a saint? Anyone who intrudes on an English Great Estate, who interrupts the order of things in rural England, a foreigner and adventurer, will meet her death on the penultimate page as the order of things resumes; dogs settle by the fire with their master whose delusions have now passed.

Frenchman's Creek was the third du Maurier of the week, in a wartime economy edition (tight cloth binding, dull blue, with yellow-brown pages, thin and rough). The Frenchman anchored in the creek, sensitive and philosophical, a gentleman who pirates for the style of the thing, at the end lets the heroine, briefly his cabin boy, go back to her life, to the order of things, her ringlets in place, her adventure safe in her memory.

Why do I choose to read popular fiction from the era of my parents' youth? Popular fiction of now I hardly read at all. (Something grating or ingratiating about styles you can situate too exactly.) I have also had periods of reading popular fiction closer to the era of my grandparents, who were illiterate.