I’ve been reading about Haddam, and Frank Bascombe’s small voyage away from it, and his small voyage back. 4.00 AM, and I’m up for paracetomol and cough relief: don’t I hear the line of narrative then, catching it by surprise as it threads inside me? In the bathroom, I hear calm male voices through the wall – strange, at this time of night: the voices of lovers? friends? – and I think I hear them as Frank Bascombe might, meeting them with prose, or drawing those voices up to the plateau of writing.
Now they will resound in another sense, and for others. Captured voices, details, giving themselves to that pressure to tell, to re-narrate the world that draws any of us up to the moors. By what impulse does any of us want to double the world, to join the streaming of writing to the details of everyday life? And it is on the everyday that Frank Bascombe is concentrated – details, details, a mad profusion.
Richard Ford writes biro on notebook. I can imagine that – and in my mind, he’s a cousin to another great notebook writer. And parts of Peter Handke’s No Man’s Bay are as dull as parts of Independence Day, but are also just as beautiful. Strange knot by which Ford loops the circular horizon of America – its possibilities, its promise, even beyond those of the battle Bascombe notes between Bush and Dukakis – within the small circumstances of a life, over a weekend. I imagine that if you unfolded Frank Bascombe’s tale in the right way, you would find all of America opening up, like one of those paper puppets you made as a child, with numbers written on its inner edges, opening and closing as it was puppeted by your fingers.
All of America; America – the whole country, but also the sense of America as project, as if it was a newly discovered country; innocent, eternally new America that opens itself from these pages mad with detail. On the back cover, a quote to say the book is a masterpiece. It isn’t one. A sport, a weird outgrowth: this is a book written up on the moors, written to celebrate solitariness, a voice detached from life and letting life echo in itself.
Frank Bascombe’s voice. But in its mad profusion, not even that. The man alone, says Aristotle, is like a god or a beast. Bascombe’s voice, it seems to me, attempts to pass itself off as a common voice, the voice of anyone with open eyes and descriptive powers. It has real beauty. It spoils us: few books flash with such sheets of prose; few books are so lushly precise.
But his voice is uncommon, alone – Bascombe is more alone than anyone. His measured, reasoning voice lets echo in its mad prolifigacy a narrative pressure that seems to draw something of writing back into itself. An inhuman voice; a voice that gives body to itself through detail so it can pass itself off like any other. And it is this voice, I imagine, that magnetises Bascombe, and draws him up onto the moors.
At four AM, Bascombe’s voice is more alive than I am, threading through the darkness. Where is it going? But the question is where it has been – everywhere, I tell myself – this voice that has exhausted everything. And isn’t this clear the more strongly it attempts to cling to the surface of the world? Details, details – and too many of them. Great, dull patches where nothing happens. Slownesses like long-necked dinosaurs chomping in the sun. What boredom! Who could inflict such a book upon themselves?
A masterpiece? A mutation. A kind of cancer wherein narrative, narrative pressure, splits into a million flashing shards, like the world seen from a dragonfly’s eye. But it is a necessary book, and I thank it for carrying me through these weeks. Alone with the book, I am as alone as Frank Bascombe, and more alone than him. It is his voice that threads forward in me at 4.00 AM in the morning. His voice as it seizes details and eats them up, his voice that never turns itself away from taking a bite of the world.
Who would I be, without this book? Lost, I think – but then I’m also lost with it; it’s lost me, I’m up on the moors knowing writing’s insistent pressure. Shouldn’t I throw details to writing like meat to hungry dogs? Shouldn’t I see my own life through a dragonfly’s eyes?
As I read, I think I know what it meant when Mishima said, words are streaming through me. They stream, and in an inexhaustible profusion. Ill and reading back over the last month’s writing, I must conclude that I too am mad in some basic way. Madness eats at me. Too many words. Words, streaming like the water from the burst pipe in my yard. And isn’t it to still that voice that I write here? Isn’t it to bring it to a halt by substituting a finished post for its eternal streaming?
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