On the office bookshelves, by chance my fingers, running along the book tops, finds one an old friend, now dead gave me because he saw I liked it. It must have been bought secondhand, for it has a name other than his on the inside cover: Helen Mills 1965, it reads. A long introduction by a famous poet, then the epigraph, which my friend, reading this book perhaps in the late 1960s, has boxed with his pen: ‘Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.’ Eckhardt, of course. And a pages later, a star by a sentence which reads: ‘We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday’s self-admiration is the legitimate father of today’s feeling of guilt’. And by a star at the bottom of the page -written as paraphrase or commentary? – ‘Everyone carries within him the seeds of his own undoing’.
A couple of pages later, in ‘The Middle Years’ of the diarist-poet, ‘What is necessary? – to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form – and then act accordingly’, and the words ‘God! Yes!’ written emphatically in the margins. ‘God! Yes’: then my friend the annotator must have recognised himself in these underlined lines (and from the same page, also underlined: ‘And only he who listens can speak’. A few pages later, and we find my friend in dialogue with the author of Markings. The commentary is vigorous, and occupies half of each page (since the editors of the volume have set out the text quite sparingly, and make room for this).
‘At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self?’ That’s how the author’s reflections begin. ‘No – he is wrong’, writes the annotator, and I can remember the vigorous turn of his thought in our many dialogues. Dialogues in which I was always comfortable, never liking the give and take of intellectual conversation. Preferable simply to listen, to take notes, to mull on what was said and then to respond in time. I had always suspected my friend never quite read books through, and so it is with this volume.
After a few more pages of passionate commetary, the text around the printed verse and prose is blank again. My friend’s footprints vanished, and I am reading farther in the text than he, and unaccompanied. ‘We never reach out towards the other. In vain – because we have never dared to give ourselves’, reads the text, and the last comment, on page 53: ‘Fear of emotional commitment. Result – Dry and arid desert of a man’. And then a little further down, ‘Poor man!’ Of course my friend was the opposite of a dry and arid desert, and he feared no such commitment. But what of the one who reads?
Reading on, I discovered I must have read it before. My own handwriting, so different from my friend’s. No flourishes, I discover. The trace of a few pencilled underlinings, I discover, remaining after my efforts to erase them. Underlining what? Sentences I now find banal. Did I ever admire this book? Perhaps only because of its form, and of what seemed possible in the aim of writing not a book of excerpts from a diary – kept through a lifetime, that seem to attest to a spiritual development, the ripening of a life – but of one made purposely as the text is presented here, in fragments.
The penultimate lines I underlined are quoted from Faulkner: ‘Our final wish is to have scribbled on the wall our "Kilroy was here"’. Was that what was intended in the markings of my friend? And what did I intend in rubbing mine away?
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