Giorgio Bassani, Oliver Sacks

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

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

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

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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

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

Does this ring a bell?

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

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

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

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

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

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

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

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

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred Hayes, The Girl on the Via Flamina

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

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

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

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

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

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

L.P. Hartley, The Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

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

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

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

L.P. Hartley, The Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I am considering my options.

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

Norman Douglas, Old Calabria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Creeley, Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Creeley, Autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the mark on the wall she moves into trees—

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

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

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

Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

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

Here is a brush with paternity, for example.

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

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

Here he is in chapter 24, Short but Happy.

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

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

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

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

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

Sholokov, Platonov

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

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

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

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

Platonov, Happy Moscow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pierre Ryckmans and Simon Leys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarice Lispector, Turgenev, Edward Louis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take your pick.

Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier

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

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

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

He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henri Michaux, A Certain Plume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He lived for years, eyes on his inner basin.

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

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

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