Some days you have to be patient. As always, I could not help but wake early; the lock-in and free beer did not prevent that, and though I had a hangover, I worked well for a few hours. Then, just as I was describing the attenuation of the verb ‘to be’ – the experience of an infinite weariness, an infinite wearing away, if experience is the right word, where even crossing from one moment to another is a great task -, I felt the force of that attenuation.
Tiredness. I walked to the office; I stayed for many hours and nothing happened. Tired, beyond tired, hours passed, most of the day passed. Then I read a great post at Waggish and thought began again. For some reason, I picked up Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden and began to read. Now against the backdrop of tiredness, not making it disappear, but as it were straining against it, I read quickly.
The hours fell away. Soon the novel was finished. Buried at its heart was an encounter. The grandmother of the female character, Lily, told her granddaughter how she met a young man, already engaged to another in a hotel garden. She was a young woman then, she said; and they talked, that young man and she for the whole afternoon. Then she and her family, who were on vacation, left for another part of Italy. Unexpectedly, the young man turned up a few days later. He spent more time with her; he departed. Then, later, she learns he was killed, along with his family, by the Nazis. She too, the grandmother, was called Lily.
Here is what the grandmother said of the conversation in the hotel garden:
We talked about everything. Nobody disturbed us. It was if we were sealed off from time. And from other people. It was as if I was there with him, talking, and as if at the same time I was at an upstairs window, looking down at us talking. I couldn’t hear what we were saying but I could hear our two voices, like two streams, intermingling and flowing together. And then it was time for him to go, and he went.
Relating the incidents in the novel in this way is too hasty. The central event, which gives the novel its title, is told in pieces. We hear it from the granddaugher, born in Britain, as she relates it to a man she meets on holiday. She, the younger Lily, has just found the hotel garden, we learn. It was not as if she was told where it was. It found her. She knew it was where she wanted to come. And she knew it was there she could meditate upon a relationship in which she was unhappy. Then she went to the mountains, where she met the male character, who is with his partner on holiday. He presses the woman for the story of the hotel garden. Eventually, she tells him. We hear her telling the story and we hear him relating the story she told him to another.
But the novel is not her story, the woman, the granddaughter. It is also about the one she tells it to. The one whose partner leaves him after his trip to the Dolomites. There’s a beautiful moment, which reminds me of some of my other favourite writers, where she says she thought she had told him what happened in that hotel garden as they descended from a mountain they walked up together. Thought that she had shared the secret of what happened there even in their tired silence. Of course, she had said nothing; nor had she, at that time, yet told him of her grandmother. It is Duras, pure Duras – the incident whose meaning is as yet unknown, which we only know, as readers, at several removes. The incident which resonates through the story in various ways.
But that is only to say that In a Hotel Garden reminds me of Duras, not that it’s derivative. And of what else does it remind me? Inevitably of Handke, in whose novels there is a preoccupation with telling, with the act of telling. Everything radiates from an encounter. In this case, marvellously, the encounter is set back yet farther as it is discussed by the male characters and his married friends. The wife thinks he, Ben, the male character, is the sort who will always love women who are drawn to a hotel garden of one kind or another. The wife is made to complain about those obsessed by the Holocaust. Why can’t they move on?, she demands.
How delicately Josipovici writes! How lightly! I know I will read this book again. I am drawn to the same hotel garden. It opens to me now, even after I closed the book. In fact, it is only after I’ve closed it that it seems to call me to it. What is the event? What is that is being told? The grandmother encountered a young man. He was killed by the Nazis. The Nazis killed his entire family. He was a Jew; so was the grandmother and, of course, her granddaughter. Being a Jew is nothing to do with belief in God, the granddaughter insists. The one she speaks of about the hotel garden is not a Jew. He is very interested in the hotel garden. We sense that he is interested in her. Is she beautiful? We don’t find out. The wife says, I would understand if she was beautiful. She thinks he, the male character, is foolish.
– Anyway, she says, there’ll always be another woman with another garden.
Ben finds out Lily, the Jewish woman, has returned to her lover. She wants to see him again. They walk along the Embankment in London towards Westminster Bridge (I walked there the other day). She says it may have been the wrong garden, the one she found. She parts from him. She extends a hand and goes up the stairs to the bridge and then goes away. Should he contact her? She had said ‘goodbye’. He discusses his dilemma with the couple. We do not learn what happened.
At the heart of the story is an event. Lily says:
It came to me at the airport. Why it was so important, that garden. It’s as if that day their whole lives were present to them, their lives before and their lives after. Everything that would happen and not happen and all that would happen and not happen to their descendants. Everything. Enclosed in that garden. Held together by the trees and the wall and the silence. That’s why I had to go there. To feel it for myself.
Ben says, except it was the wrong garden. She replies:
It doesn’t matter where it was. The important thing is that everything came together in a single moment in a single enclosed spot. And if I could really feel it, really understand it, then perhaps I could understand why I was alive and what I had to do.
In a hotel garden: am I right to understand that in this enclosed space there was the unity of tradition? That broken thereafter was that same unity? Ah, that’s too quick. She says, Lily, that it the catastrophe was a Jewish catastrophe. He asks her if it wasn’t a human one. She can’t think like that she says. Later, to the married couple he will complain that there are too many difficult decisions to made in life. Whether to phone her or not to phone Lily again, for example.
How difficult everything is! Difficult for Ben, says the wife to her husband, later. Not for anyone else. But then she is crass, the wife, and lacks imagination. Something has changed. Something has changed in the nature of telling. No longer – to be brief – is it subject to the great norms, the great certainties of an older form of life. No longer trust, then, but suspicion. Telling is magnetised in Josipovici – as in Duras, as in Handke – by a kind of uncertainty. No borrowed terms will do. No traditions, no norms impose themselves. Telling must speak of this, too – must speak of the uncertainty of telling. That is what literature is. This is the experience of literature now, today: the telling in which telling is wagered.
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