40 … 50 – what day is it now? We’re back from our trip. Whitby, then Robin Hood’s Bay – an afternoon in Scarborough, too, which we tried to escape almost as soon as we there. My Visitor wanted to find the grave of Anne Brontë, but we had no guide to direct us; I wanted to visit Seaworld, so we went to see the otters and the seals but, walking back to town, fell into a malaise: we were in a town as horrible as Robin Hood’s Bay was lovely (hidden cobbled streets following the shaded stream down to the sea versus the concrete promenade in full sun; fossil hunters tapping hammers along the soft sea cliff versus deck-chaired ice-cream eaters burned red raw on the narrow strip of brown sand …)
We rounded the hill crowned by the ruins of the castle (and, unbeknowst to us, by the graveyard in which Anne Brontë’s resting place could be found) and walked rapidly through town to escape. Then the bus back to the fish and chip paradise of Whitby, where I’d found Nadezdha Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope in its original English edition, in hardback a few days previously. And didn’t I have to debate whether to buy the first and third volumes of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in hardback from the same shop?
I bought Under the Volcano instead – a new copy, though discounted, and it became scuffed from stuffed in my rucksack on our walks through the countryside. It was the introduction that swayed me to want to rebegin the book: it said Lowry’s novel was as difficult of access as Conrad’s Nostromo. Well then, I must make another try, I thought to myself, and bought it for £5.
In Robin Hood’s Bay, there were three small bookshops. In the last, I saw Keith Sagar’s Life Into Art, on D.H. Lawrence. Old style literary criticism, my Visitor and I agreed. Should I buy it? £7, and it would have to carried alongside the hardback Mandelstam and the softbacked Lowry through the countryside. No, I thought, though it seemed like the gods had put the book on that back shelf for me to buy.
That evening, we walked among the exposed rock of Baystown, as the locals call it, and ate at The Bramblewick. Later on, read a few pages of the Mandelstam about the poet’s bookshelf and marvelled: Osip had learned old Italian to read Dante, and the second largest section of his bookcase was reserved to the Italians: Aristo, Tasso; the prose writers Vasri, Boccaccio and Vico; there were the Latin poets too: Ovid, Horace, Tibullus, Catullus and the Germans: Goethe, the Kleists, the Romantics. The French too: Villon, Barbier – with his wife (the author of Hope Against Hope), he translated Sinclair Lewis and other English-language authors; and didn’t he have a go at producing a Russian Mallarmé?
He didn’t keep copies of the books of his contemporaries, Nadezhda notes; she also rejects the story of Osip reading Petrach in the Gulag under the light of the stars. Her voice is tough, unsentimental: what she has lived through! I read in the eaves of a Baystown B&B, the pub Ye Dolphin almost directly opposite, the view of the sea, the hills rising up …
The next morning, rising late, we take breakfast and then lunch at The Swell, and I tell my Visitor my life has peaked, for we had 5 Hellos to read, and cups of good coffee, and a Ploughman’s Lunch each. ‘It doesn’t get any better than this’, I said, though that night I think it did get better, after we had returned by bus from Scarborough (our daytrip) to Whitby, and ate at the superlative White Horse and Griffin, I having learnt to order the same as my Visitor who has an instinct about these things (she ‘s re-educating my tastes …)
This is a Sebald-style trip, I said to my Visitor. Wandering from place to place, with the vaguest plan. I’ll bet the real Sebald didn’t wander alone, I said. His wife was with him, I’ll bet, just like Naipaul’s wife was with him all along in The Enigma of Arrival (all the secondhand stores are full of Naipaul, but the wrong ones: The Mimic Men, Half a Life, and never the ones I would buy …) An Osip has a Nadezdha, and a Virginia (whose Diaries only turn up in secondhand shops in the most tatty condition) a Leonard. No one really wanders alone, I said.
We’re the living room, a sunny midmorning, tea in two mugs, the louvre doors newly painted and the fireplace creamy white now, not brown; the damp a distant memory and only the cliff-like walls in the kitchen and the bathroom to be painted. In the middle of summer – that’s where we are. In the middle, as from where grass grows in all directions – into the future, but into the present too, and into the past.
In the middle of summer – and the middle of life, there from where life spreads out, illuminated from this sole sunlit source. Not as if it reached a peak here, not really, but as though it was from here burned the light that glowed all along and hereafter under everything.
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