It’s what will happen if you lay plaster on wet brick, says the loss adjuster, looking at the discoloured walls of the kitchen, deep brown and rich green. Who installed your kitchen? I tell her. She shakes her head. And what about your damp proofing? It was their fault she says. I’m amazed they put plaster on top of wet brick. It’s very porous, she says of the new plaster. That’s why the damp spread so quickly.
Your bathroom’s ok, she says, but we’ll have to dry out your wall. Everything’ll have to come out. We might have to replace the cupboards, too. And you’ll have to empty them. And we’ll need the washing machine out. Looking up at the ceiling she said, I’m surprised the washing machine from upstairs hasn’t come right through. The joists are completely rotten.
I am reassured, even if the loss adjuster was nothing like the one in Atom Egoyan’s film. When she leaves I lie in the other room on the bed in the morning sun, reading Henry Green, and thinking, all is well. Earlier this morning, I had to listen to Donny Hathaway’s eponymous album to steady my nerves. And then My Name Is … by Albert Ayler. And I reread a little more of Concluding.
But now I reward myself in relief a tidbit or two from Surviving. I read a little of what his son, the editor, wrote about his father. The old anecdote about the glass of water Henry Green’s colleagues remembered at his elbow in long meetings at work being full of gin in fact. And his visit to America, where he is feted as a writer, the doorman, at the end of the week bidding him goodbye by his pseudonym and not his real name. And his meeting his hero, Celine.
By these facts my world repairs myself. Thank goodness for Green and my hardback Surviving. I reread the essay on C. M. Doughty and underline some passages for future reflection. ‘A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality’, I underline. ‘But what a man is, also makes the way he writes, as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character.’
And then I remember how W. likes to criticise my old velvet jacket. ‘Who wears velvet jackets?’, he says. ‘You have to look at the kids, at what the kids are wearing.’ For his part, W. likes to dress up in a suit. ‘Your trousers are very scruffy’, says W., look at them.’ And he’s right – they flap objectionably unironed around my legs. ‘Where did you get them? Primark?’
And then the phrase a friend of mine uses: ‘brown style’. ‘That’s what you were trying for in your book, wasn’t it?’, he said. Brown style – like Henry James, he said. And it’s true I was looking for something, for some kind of style, but in the end whatever style I have is scruffy and borrowed and bought at some cheap shop.
If I print anything out from the blog, which I do rarely, the first impression I have is light horror. An ape’s style, I think. But I expect little more, which is why the horror is light. And sometimes I even think that what is written here is worse than the books. I think: what a waste of time!, and curse blogging for the great detour that it is. And feel guilty that I should be thinking more, and writing more, or at the very least reading more, and pressing my reading through tougher books.
As it is, though, my reading is tough enough. Rise early, pages of Voicing the Popular open, and now to decipher that passage or that, having hunted down the books referred to and gone through those, and then, in a document in Word I add notes to my notes, wondering how I am to pull it all together.
And thank goodness for Sinthome who writes about Lacan and Zizek so lucidly, so I can fill out my very scanty knowledge of psychoanalysis that I need to read Richard Middleton’s book. Why don’t I stick always to what I know?, I ask myself as I read, and take notes. And of course I barely know what I’m supposed to know; I’m bad enough at that, and it is a cause of shame that I’ve published anything at all, what impertinence!
My god, what we’re doing to philosophy!, I always say to W. But then shouldn’t you at least once a year break into some new area? So many books. Middleton leads to Mowitt, who of course depends on Lacan, and Zizek. Dolar’s book, of course, in the pile by my bed. And what of Laclau on populism, and the book with Mouffe?
How much did these books cost me, all piled up? And why am I reading Green instead, if I’m reading at all? It’s at these times, I wish I had a realise excuse for not forcing my reading on, or writing. Write a paper, I tell myself. Submit something. W. wants me to begin another book, if only to listen to me moan. Then I’ve got to read Adorno on popular music, and then Taussig on mimesis, and shouldn’t I at least glimpse at Latour, since Middleton mentions him, and I really need to take some notes from Attali.
And then I think with my stupidity: how will another age look back on this one, and who will read what. And then I curse my stupidity and my thoughts drift to the damp, just as the spores of mildew drift, I imagine, into one’s throat and then into the lungs. To read Middleton, you have to you know your Zizek, or at least the first few books. And then of course Lacan, and Freud. And don’t I want to make some critical remarks or another on his take on this or that thinker?
I suppose the pleasure I take in Green is that I am not supposed to be reading him – or that I read on borrowed time. Here is Surviving beside me on my desk: don’t read it, I tell myself. Don’t open it. And you can write on damp if only to share your joy with the world that it has but one source after all, and that if it spread, it’s only because the plaster was new and porous in its newness. And that the brown and blue-green stained plaster will be hacked off again to the brick, and the bricks dried out with machines, and then the whole kitchen reassembled.
A room that is only six feet by six feet by six feet has caused a lot of trouble, I think to myself. A room – a cube that is as though tacked onto my flat, which is really one half of a divided house, which is why its rooms are so strangely sized. Built in 1895, above a mineshaft, I tell our guests as they drop me home on the way to their hotel.
This was once a coalfield, I tell them, looking about. But it was closed in the mid 1800s, and then they built houses for the workers in a factory brought it from the Borders to work here, I tell them. Hence the name: Ancrum Street – Ancrum is a town in the Borders, I tell them.
But all this is very well, I tell them, but the damp’s the problem, nothing else. And in all the ground floor flats, I tell them, up and down the street. Yes, that’s our real drama, I tell them. It’s our only concern: the damp. I’ve had mushrooms growing in my flat, I tell them. And for a time the slugs were omnipresent. And ants – though I think there’s too much damp for them now, and it’s winter. But there’s still these little snails, which fall through the hole above the sink. I don’t mind when I find them in a mug, I tell them. They’re decorative, like small stones.
But now, of course, the hole will be closed, and the kitchen stripped out and the plaster chipped off and they’ll begin again from the brick. They’ll bring in drying machines and dry the place out, and that’ll be it: down to the brick, all karmic debts repaid and perhaps damp will follow me about like a dog no longer.
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