The Egg Marketing Board

1.

There are those among us whose lives seem incomplete, or less complete than our own. They search, but for what are they searching? What is it they want and what might we give them? Perhaps there is nothing can be given; there is no cure. The search is all.

Sometimes, that search will awaken in us a search of our own. As though we were implicated in their search. As though, because of their incompletion, we too experience our incompletion. But this is an experience at one remove from theirs.

What does it mean to love someone like that? You will never have them, that is true, perhaps – or they will never have you. There is a mismatch; she (let us say it is a she) has turned away from you. She turns and turns and does not face you. But that, by itself, fascinates.

Perhaps part of us wants to be not wanted. That is why, in love, there must be gaps of non-love, where the other, the beloved, turns away. Then you will have to earn her love again. You become the hunter and so your love is reborn in ardour.

But what if the turning occurred before there was love? What if it occurred at its brink, at where there should have been the beginning of an affair? Then, after she has turned, you are not sure anything happened. Did it begin? Or was it stalled before it began. Either way, you have still been caught, implicated. Love did not begin. But its possibility began; a space was opened.

2.

I am thinking again, for the last time, I promise, of Josipovici’s In A Hotel Garden. Two events: the grandmother, Lily, in her youth, meets the young violinist, already engaged, in a hotel garden. They talk all day; nothing happens between them. They do not meet again. He is killed by the Nazis. For a long time he sent her letters, and once a toy donkey. Now he is dead. The grandmother marries; soon she has a daughter; she moves to England and her daughter has a daughter in turn.

The grandaughter is called after her grandmother. Lily comes to Italy to find the hotel garden; she finds it. But now, perhaps, another almost affair. She meets Ben, another holidayer from England, whose partner is sick. They walk in the hills. He asks her about the hotel garden; eventually she tells him. But now, in this telling, and because of the time they spent together, they are brought, it seems, to the brink of an affair. Only when they meet again, in London, Ben finds Lily has returned to the partner whom she had left. She had told Ben about her lover while in Italy. She had come to Italy to think about her affair, she had said. But in London, Ben finds he has returned to him, her lover. She is back with him and his dog.

3.

When they meet, Lily tells Ben she might have been wrong. It might have been the wrong garden she found. It doesn’t matter, she says. She just felt she had to tell him. Because he’d helped her to talk about it. She feels a bit like a fraud, she says. She says the trip to the garden helped. ‘I just feel more established in my difference now I’ve been there’. Later:

– I suppose it’s to do with a past, she says. Having your own past and nobody else’s. This is you. There isn’t anybody else like that. There never was and never will be. So it’s a responsibility.

Having a past. It is now she speaks again of Absalom. What does it mean, this responsibility? To have a past and to feel different in the way one has a past? It is, I think, a responsibility to oneself – to find out the secret plot of your life. Has she found that plot for herself? Has she found the event that even if it does not explain her to herself will allow her to find her way toward the future? I considered this in a previous post.

4.

This book is about Ben, not just Lily.

Ben speaks of Lily to his friends. To Francesca, married to his friend Rick. She once had a relationship with Ben. Ben had loved her, though that was a long time ago. And now? Francesca is happy with Rick and they speak of Ben. Their conversation:

She said to him: – He went on at me about whether he should see her again or not.

– And what did you advise him?

– How could I advise him? she says. Whatever he does it’ll be wrong.

– Why wrong?

– It always is. He thinks about it too much. It’s all theoretical with him.

A bit later:

– Oh for God’s sake, she says. He doesn’t know her. He’s only obsessed with this garden of hers. And it turns out not even to be the right one.

– It might be the right one, he says.

– Oh it might be! she says.

– I don’t think it matters anyway, he says, whether it’s the right one or not.

Francesca thinks it does matter. Later, she says, ‘Anyway […] there’ll always be another woman with another garden’. Just as, as Francesca had said to her husband earlier, Ben went out with the woman from the Egg Marketing Board just because he was intrigued by such a job title. But this is facile. We know there is no comparison betweent the Egg Marketing Board and the hotel garden.

Later still, married couple go to sleep. And Francesca says, ‘Do you know anything about Absalom’s hair?’ Ben had told her of Absalom earlier. They sleep. I think to myself, reading, what would Francesca, or a woman like this fictional one, know of Absalom and of what the Rabbis said about him? Everything is easy for her. She has her husband, her dog, her child. She thinks she is practical, but in fact she has just been lucky. Perhaps, as she says of herself at one point, she is just unimaginative.

But think of Ben. Think of the way the incident in the hotel garden reverberates through him. We always hear him questioning Lily. Does he understand, now? Perhaps his is the condition of Absalom in the wood. He is tired and frightened and everything is happening too fast. But that is melodramatic. He is simply confused. What should he do? Call her again?

5.

The novel does not tell us what he does. But I think he needs Lily because her event has somehow become his. That he has found with her something similar to what her grandmother found with the violinist in the hotel garden. Of course he will not be killed by the Nazis like that young man. But there is a sense that those events are being repeated in pianissimo.

She left him quite abruptly in London. She said, goodbye and gave him back to himself. But now he is incomplete. Francesca is wrong to say Ben is too theoretical. Rather, he has been left in the wake of an event, an encounter. He has been uncompleted. Now he complains to Francesca that it is left to him to phone or write to Lily. Why does everything have to be so complicated, he asks?

As I say, we are not told what happened. Is the hotel garden any different to the Egg Marketing Board with respect to Ben? But Ben is not a real person and in the end, to be fascinated by this book, to be implicated it, is to experience this difference for oneself. In this way, the book itself might become our hotel garden.

6.

How different this is, say, to McEwan’s Saturday. I refer you to Steve’s posts here and here on this novel. The upshot: Saturday does not allow you, as reader, to experience the Iraq war in the manner of the hotel garden. The whole event passes you by. Perhaps a whole ethics of reading and writing could be framed in these terms.