Lear

Why isn’t the caffeine hitting? This is the last full day I have to work on the book. I can send an electronic copy to them on the 11th, the publishers told me. And don’t worry, they said, we’ll get a proper copy editor this time.

Tomorrow, to London and from there to San Francisco. I can proofread on the plane. ‘I’ve read my book 18 times’ says W., proudly. ‘I haven’t even put my chapters together into one file’, I tell him. ‘It’s going to be a fiasco’.

‘Why didn’t you give yourself enough time?’ says W. ‘We had the audit’, I tell him, ‘and the QAA. I wrote the paperwork.’ – ‘You’ve always got an excuse’, says W.

I’ve drank a Frescato, a cup of green tea and a third of a can of Irn-Bru. When will the caffeine hit?

I think to myself: your whole life will have been an excuse for not writing a good book. You’ll never write one, though you may write a lot of books. But what is it that is lacking? W. and I often pose this question to each other. ‘You still want to be a great writer’, W. claims. He has said this on many occasions. I tell him his love of failure still shows a nostalgia for success.

I remind him of what K. told me: his lecturers, active during May 1968, had turned to drink. They were drunk, all of them, all the time. I think of Debord and Duras. This morning it suddenly struck me what I disliked about some Bergman films: it was the sense that the dynamics of the couple were somehow important, worthy of drama. I think to myself: I can’t take these rich Scandinavian couples seriously. They’ve all the advantages. Their anguish is pure self-indulgence.

I listen to my box set of The Fall Peel Sessions. ‘The Fall are never self-indulgent’, I tell W. ‘Mark E. Smith is a genius’, he says. I tell him of the interview with his mum which appeared in a recent biography. ‘She said if he had gone to university he would have become an academic’. I’ve always found this horrifying.

What happens when intensity can find no focus, nothing to do? When it cannot aim itself at political activity, at the revolution, nor console itself in philosophical thinking that would prepare for the revolution? In a letter to Kojeve, Bataille writes of unemployed negativity. The man of unemployed negativity, he notes, can console himself in art or in religion. But Bataille is too honest for that. Debord too.

The difference between Bergman and Duras is enormous. She understands that loving is analogous to dying, the ‘to love’ to the ‘to write’. The Malady of Death breaks with the theatricality which still mars Bergman. Even films like The Silence remain within the space opened by Ibsen: a drama of selves, of individuals on a stage. Strindberg will sometimes point in another direction.

I saw King Lear with Corin Redgrave a few weeks back. It was as wonderful as Hecuba starring his sister was bad. The same in Shakespeare as The Fall: the drama becomes a drama which explodes the limits of the human being. I should substantiate this claim, but there’s no time. You’ll never find me using the word ‘subject’ or ‘subjectivity’. Bloom is wrong: Shakespeare invented the inhuman.

The new book is a fiasco. ‘The first book was terrible, but at least it was ambitious’, I tell W., ‘the new book isn’t even ambitious …’ Youth: the dream that one day you will write a book, a good book. Age: laughter which turns the whole world into the moor on which Lear was lost. It was only with age, with the sense of crushed dreams and laughter at those same dreams that I came to love Shostakovich. The 4th Symphony is already the work of a crushed man whose laughter has dissolved the world.