It is not very companionable to read – for a couple to be reading separate books side by side on the sofa, say, or lying on the bed. I read Gombrowicz’s A Kind of Testimony – at first engaging, with a marvellous voice – a voice that I would have thought has been selected from a slew of voices; a voice – this voice – that is fitted to the task of the laughing defiance of the opening chapters; but becoming drearily self-same, displacing the other voices the book might have called for, until it becomes reedy and narcissistic.
But how can I pay it attention, really – how to listen out for those other, occluded voices as I lie side by side with my Beloved, or sitting alongside her? There’s nothing worse than reading couples, I tell myself. A reading couple – what an absurdity! Ignoring each other – to read! Or pretending to ignore each other, and not being able really to ignore each other! It’s the worst of images: the reading couple, or worse, the scholarly couple, a couple who each have a separate study, who study alongside one another in separate rooms – what horror! The scholarly couple who agree to do a couple of hours’ work on a Saturday morning and then meet for lunch in the living room!
Perhaps reading requires for more solitude than that, and to read must be to read alone, drawing the night around you turning pages in a cone of light before the drawn curtains. You would read as Kafka said he would write: in a room underground, far below the earth and the everyday to which he might be occasionally brought meals, but in which he was alone, essentially alone. To read – really to read! But it would be as impossible as what Kafka called writing. In the end, reading is always on the way to Reading, whether sitting alongside another or reading alone (and at the end, didn’t Kafka write in the same room as Dora Diamant, alongside her? Only at the end – what cruelty!). Reading – impossible; but still there is reading, and if there is another alongside whom you can read – all the better …
Perhaps this all seems absurd. Why read? Who reads, and who, really, looks for Reading in reading? Perhaps Reading is never about the books themselves, but of what it means to read when no one reads, when reading is losing importance, and a vast world of culture is slowly retreating from our reach.
Laughter. Is that it – the sense of a vanishing culture, of an Old Europe or an Old America? The sense that to keep reading is to protect it, to watch over it, carrying it along like the holy of holies, as it would watch over you? The great names of Europe! The great poets! The arch novelists! To carry it all on your back, like Nietzsche’s camel! – poor you! …
What a sham! As though you had any essential relation to Proust, whom you only read in translation! Or Musil – or Broch! Or Woolf, say, or Green – or Conrad! You came to late for any of them, you tell yourself. Too late – and these are already late books, books of the end. The last of a wave that broke upon old Europe – no, that was old Europe, or what we imagine Europe, from our distance, might have been. Those names now shaken free of their contemporaries, separate from the others, detached from their constellations and shining like remote, solitary stars, each seemingly sufficient unto themselves … what have they to do with you? What connection do they have to you, who were born long after their writers died?
Old Europe – isn’t this the most laughable of fantasies? Perhaps this is why I liked Montano’s Malady, a book written after the end of the end, when literature – absurd word – became a kind of sickness, a sickness of literature, a fantasy sickness of a world that seems to have withdrawn but that never held the unity of a world, and never belonged to Old Europe.
Too many books. You should give them away, neglect them. Bag them up and leave them in an old cupboard. Leave them for someone else to find – as I found, once, a novel by Lawrence, not knowing who he was or what he wrote. A novel by Lawrence, read when I’d finished all my other novels (McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, Kiteworld by Keith Roberts), read before I knew who he was. Was it the ‘bright book of life’? Something like that. And I remember reading The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man my back against the warmed wood at Winnerish Triangle station, just after I’d finished the Mammoth Book of Fantasy. And The Magic Mountain, ordered after I saw a section dramatised by Malcolm Bradbury on TV – The Modern World, was that it? – The Magic Mountain, pompous and overblown, and yet, and yet …
They’d found their way to me, these books – is that it? The classics selected me and called me forward? I think almost any of those bright books of Life would have done back then. Any book – anything of modernism, any questioning book that questioned style and itself and wrote in a new way and asked for writing in a new way. As though you could continue the experiment on the pages of your own life. As though art could cross over to life – no wonder there was a great politics mingled with the great gesture of writing. And wasn’t it that that I sought and that that I wanted? A new life, or a life counterposed to the company where I worked and to the hi-tech computer park to which I commuted every day?
Soon, I’d discovered the Surrealists, the Situationists … and it would be Life itself that I dreamed of – Life as it lay in the depths of Reading. Wasn’t it there like a fish – Another Life, Another Way of Living? And isn’t this why I like to like reading still – in memory of the Life that flashed at the bottom of reading – a Life that I could have reared myself up to want back then, when I was young? Life as the opposite of the everyday of the company and the hi tech park?
There is always something egoistic about couples – a withdrawal, a separation from the business of life but also for the hope of a great politics and a great overturning. The egoism of two – how is a reading possible that lets Life quiver at its base? It is enclosed by domesticity, by the happy familiarity of a way of living insulated from jobs and companies. Reading is another way of inhabiting a home, of enclosing what lives outside and flashes with the hope of another life, another way of living.
A page has been turned – or is it the last page that has turned. The last one – already turned, then when you didn’t know it was the last, when it became the least important page of all. As in that Abba song, ‘The Day Before You Came’ that lists the last, insignificant actions before the Beloved arrives. The day before – old Europe. Or the last modernist Europe that you know only by its withdrawal, when the great conjoining of Life and Art has vanished into the air.
My Beloved is reading Nina Simone’s autobiography. I read it too, on the train going South. Of the Civil Rights movement, and of a life Simone recalls that was lived in common, that had no room for privacy. A Life that tolerated no domestic enclosure – that threw wide every house, every dinner party. That’s what Duras’s house on the rue Saint Benoit became too, in the campaign against French colonialism in Algeria. Where Blanchot and others drafted the ‘Manifesto of the 121’; where Schuster and Mascolo put together the periodical le 14 Julliet.
Has reading – but I’m not reading much – become a retreat? Has reading lost Reading by losing Life, and the dancing promise of another world? But I wonder from my new domesticity whether I can encounter books as what they only ever were: books, fictions and non-fictions and poems. Books to be boxed up and given away – just books, books and only books, and no longer part of the great dream, of a great politics? As they only ever were …
Now I think of Smog’s ‘Held’, used for an advert for one car or another. ‘Held’ and Bob Dylan driving along. Why did Dylan do the advert? Why did Bill Callahan sell the song? Because a song is only a song … is that it? A song is just a song, and he’s a jobbing song writer, and Dylan a jobbing icon who needs to make a buck? A car driving along needs a song, and why not this one, which nestles next to ‘River Guard’ on Knock Knock? And didn’t Dylan long sell ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’ for the adverts for some accountancy firm?
As they only ever were … but literature, old Europe could never be anything other than a promise, another life. A promise … for whom? For us – but who were we? The few who read, and for whom reading was – what? A colleague read Genet: wasn’t that something? I lent him Breton: wasn’t that something? Breton in the corridors of Digital Electronics? Genet in the open plan offices of Hewlett Packard? Who were we? The few who read, and for whom Reading was always more than reading (and weren’t there Listeners, too – and Seers? but we were Seers and Listeners too).
A page is turning – or it has already turned. Turned and the book is closed, the book that was never open. There was no old Europe. Reading looked for what it could not find. Life was never but what it was here, in the open plan offices, in the carparks of Winnersh Triangle – is that it? Life was never elsewhere, but here, and nowhere else but here – is that it?
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