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.