Where are the good old days, when Rabelais wrote as a child might pee against a tree, to relieve himself? The old days when literature took a deep breath and created itself freely, among people, for people!
Play Acting
In Waterstones Plymouth, looking for something to read. The Spire, has W. read that? Golding? Oh yes, W.’s read it. He’s read all of Golding. It was part of his great reading phase, W. says. He read everything, everything! Piles and piles of literature! That was in the evening, after reading and writing on philosophy. The day reading philosophy and writing philosophy and the evening reading literature, author after author. Those were his golden years, says W. He was in his heyday! He doesn’t read anything now, says W. with great melancholy. Or very little. It happens in your late 30s, says W., you can’t read as much anymore. You can’t read and write for a whole day, and then read in the evening as well.
Of course other things get in the way, too. He hardly worked in those days. His job was virtually part-time. How things have changed? What time does W. have now for reading? Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe to read Kafka. Off he goes, a fifteen minute walk through Stonehouse up to the Naval Dockyards and then the ferry across the Tamar – a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that. And then a short walk the other side to the tulip garden, where W. gets out his Kafka. Although he loves Kafka, loves him more than anyone and always did,. in some sense Kafka crushes him. How can a human being write anything this great?, he asks himself, and then thinks ruefully of his own work. Where did it all go wrong?, W says.
I’ve never gone through that, have I?, W. says. I’ve never really experienced failure. In fact I hardly regard myself as a failure at all, W. is sure of that. All that writing on the net, for example. would Kafka ever write on the net? Of course not. W. doubts I’ve ever really read Kafka. If I had, then doubtless I wouldn’t be writing on the net. You want to be loved, says W., that’s your weakness. The net is your delusion. If I had really known my own failure, I would know that. W. has been to the bottom, he says, but he doubts I have. In truth, I’ve never really known failure, despite everything I write, says W. It’s all play-acting.
Once, W. too thought of himself as a writer, a literary writer. He filled notebook after notebook. It was in his early twenties. Everyone wants to be a literary writer in their early 20s, says W. Of course no one ever is. W. realised it pretty quickly. I knew I was no Kafka, says W. That’s what you don’t know yet – you don’t know you’re not Kafka. You don’t have a sense of yourself as a failure, which is ironic because you are a failure.
A Five Year Hole
How much time do we have left? Not long, W. says. We’re not the sort who live long lives. Look at us! He hasn’t felt himself for 20 years, says W., and I’ve long since run to fat and bleary eyed alcoholism. But I am more of a whiner than he is, W. says. There’s always something wrong with me, isn’t there? One day it’s a nosebleed, the next nausea, the next some indeterminate fever … And my stomach, whatever is wrong with my stomach?
W. never used to believe me about my stomach. He thought I was a hypocondriac. But once he saw my face turn green – green! – he understood. You looked appalling, he said. Everyone was horrified, everyone at the table. And then, for a terrible morning when he was visiting me, W. was taken ill. It’s my stomach! My God!, he cried. He decided it was my lifestyle. All that drinking! All that eating! One night, he saw me pass out from overeating. My head fell back … he was worried, but then he heard me snoring.
How can you live like this?, said W. exasperated beyond belief. How? This is my five year hole, I told W. Everyone should be allowed one of those. Deleuze had one, didn’t he? An eight year hole, that’s what he called it, in which he wrote nothing? But Deleuze was working, says W., and you don’t do any work, do you? What happened to you? How did you get like this? Why don’t you read anymore? Why don’t you write?
We’re on the electric bus, which W. notes, only serves middle class people, and very few of them, not working class ones. There’s never anyone on this bus!, he claims. Except for us, today when it’s absolutely necessary. We’re in a hurry. We’re looking for a toilet. There’s the toilet in my office, thank God, and it’s 10 minutes away by bus. If we had to walk, my God!, says W., imagining the horror. This is your life, isn’t it? This is how you live!, he says. Drunk and then ill, drunk and then ill …
W. is ill and I am ill, as always. W. blames me. It’s your lifestyle! What can you expect? What do you do all day? Later, he wonders whether I ever worked at all. Was there ever a time when you read?, he asks. W. reads every day, rising at dawn, and putting in three hours before he does anything else. I don’t wash, I don’t eat breakfast. I don’t even have a cup of tea, W. says. His German isn’t very good, so it takes him forever to read anything. Rosenzweig took him a year, and he didn’t understand a word of it. Not a word!
Now it’s Cohen. W. eats and breathes Cohen, he says, but he doesn’t really understand Cohen either. You have to know maths, says W., and he was never very good at maths. Additionally, W. is learning Greek for the umpteenth time. Greek! It’s the aorist that defeats him every time. Still, he’s begun again, he’s reading, he’s writing – not for publication, says W., publication doesn’t matter at all. And what am I doing? What have I read lately?
Drawing is for Giacometti another breathing. In order to model or paint one must have earth, canvas, colours. Drawing is possible anywhere, at any time, and Giacometti draws anywhere, at any time. He draws to see and can see nothing without drawing, mentally at any rate: each thing seen is drawn within him. The drawing eye of Giacometti knows no rest, no faigue. Nor does our eye, as it contemplates his drawings, have the right to rest. it is forbidden to linger over a detail, a form, an empty space. A strange, perpetual motion, without which it would lose sight of the subject, draws it on.
This optical phenoneomon results from the very nature of Giacometti’s drawing, from its mobility which is the product of the repetition and discontinuity of the line. The form is never immobilised by an outline or held within isolated and sure strokes. It is not detached from the background or separated by a ressuring boundary from the space which surrounds it. It issues from a multitude of overlapping lines which correct and weigh down each oter, and abolish one another as liness they increase. Thus the line is never continuous but broken, interrupted, open at every moment on the void but revoking it at once by its renewals, its unforeseen returns.
This results in an imprecision of detail and an intentional indefiniteness which repel the eye at each impact, as though by a minature electric shock, sending it from one detail to the next, and from each to the totality which they produce as they disappear. These goings and comings, this dancing race of our eye, gives us the subject to see at a distance, as Giacometti sees it, in its impassable space, across the ambient void which disturbs and infects its image.
[…] In its rapid whorls the drawing carves our depth, or rather breathes it in, opens itself to it and renders its active between the strokes. It is as though a force issuing from within beings or things gushes out like a fluid through the interstices of the drawing and the porousness of the forms. And the lines must reveal this force, that is, both contain it and provoke its escape. This is the reason for their discontinuity. The interruptions and accumlations of line are never felt as superflous repetitions and incongruous stops since they are the equivalent of the eye’s mobility. On the contrary they contribute to give the objects this trembling, this feeling of truth and life.
[…] When Matisse draws a leaf with his lively and supple line, he also fixes it in a single one of its appearance and thus immobilises it tyrannically for eternity. Giacometti cannot or dose not care to gather such an image and immolate it according to his whims. As he multiplies its possibilities of seeming, he leaves the object its uncertain development, its anxious mobility. He does not draw up a single course but opens a multitude of paths among which the object can choose, or at least seem to hesitate continually, drawing from its indecision its quivering autonomy and the trembling of a separate life.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
In the centre of the tiny, culttered studio, lit by a skylight, Diego poses, sitting immobile aand resigned on a stool: he is used to it. But Alberto, in spite of having examined his brother’s face for almost fifty years, is not yet used to it. He is just as astonished as he was on the very first day before this unknown, immeasurable head, which defies and refuses him, which offers only its refusal. If he approaches his brother, the latter’s head grows out of all proportion, becomes gigantic and threatening, ready to topple on him like a mountain or the angry face of a god. But if he backs away a few paces Diego recedes into infinity: his tiny, dense head seems a planet suspended in the immense void of the studio. In any case, and whatever the distance, it forbids him to approach. It looms abruptly, a separate, irreducible entity.
[…] We know what a head is’, exclaimed André Breton one day, disappointed and irritated that Giacometti preferred reality to the imaginarg. We do indeed know what a head is. But the knowledge, precisely, is what Giacometti is struggling against.
Face to face with his sculpture, we are scarcely freer than Giacometti in front of his model. For it carries itsdistance within it and keeps us at a respectful distance. And our relationship recreates the strictly evaluated space so that its totality, and that alone, may appear. This figure does not allow us to rest our eyes on one or another of its parts; each detail refers us back at once to the whole. It does not develop a rhythm which would gradually conduct us owards an encounter. it does ot reveal itself as a series of plasic events leading to a harmony, a chord. It bursts forth in its immediate presence: it is an advent.
The figures keep us at a distance; they carry their remoteness inside them and reveal their profound being. Naked, unmasked, it is now their unknown doubles who come to light. Their hieratic attitude reveals an imperious insensitivity. They elude our understanding, reject our impulsive gestures. They do not disain us; they ignore us and dominate us. One would think them fastened on their pedestals for eternity, rooted to their rock. The gravity of their bearing, the asceticism of their demeanor and their gaze which traverses time and traverses us too withou flinching, without suspecting our opacity and our stupefaction, gives them the appearance of divinities. They seem to await a primitive cult.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
By copying what he sees, as his father taught him when he was a boy, he hopes to give consistency to the reality which eludes him, to see it, hold on to it, and hence to affirm himself in its presence. And as he copies it he advances toward the most exact portrayal of what he sees, but also toward awareness of the absolute impossibility of this attempt, The affective ordeal becomes identified with his experience of the perception which objectifies the inner drama. His procedure turns into a stubborn, furious pursuit of a prey which escapes him or of a shadow which he rejects. The closer he comes to the truth of the object, the more he deepens the gulf which separates him from it, the more he feels and communicates the acute feelings of his difference and his separation.
[…] Through a series of trials, failures, leaps ahead which are but the varied moments of a single experience, Giacometti approaches the inaccessible goal he assigned himself, and at the same time expresses the lyric investigation of a consciousness tortured by the impossibility of communicaion.
Giacometti […] strives to copy what he sees, simply, ‘stupidly’, desperately.
[…] With any other artist it would be theoretically possible to determine exactly what a single touch of colour or a stroke of the chisel brings to the work in progress, for each gesture adds itself to the preceding one, modifying the part and the whole, causing the work to advance toward its end (the end proposed or supposed from the beginning). Giacometti’s gesture is of another sort. His repeating, his re-examining contradict the deforming brutality of each particular intervention. To make and unmake incessantly is to diminish, to deaden each gesture, to drown it gently in sequence and number, as the sea absorbs its weaves.
Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays
Each of my books was created at a different place. Vienna, Brussels, somewhere in Yugoslavia, in Poland. I never had a desk in mind. When writing was going well it didn’t matter where I did it. I also wrote with the greatest noise around me. I’m not disturbed by a crane or a noisy crowd or a screaming tram, or a laundry or a butcher’s. I always liked to work in a country where I didn’t understand the language. That was stimulating. A strangeness where you are one hundred percent at home.
Writing delights me. That’s nothing new. That’s the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That’s how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That’s how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don’t experience.
Corners and Cellars
Once more today, the first of the year, I try to write this text which has occupied me nearly exclusively for a week, but each day the difficulty of finding the words, of constructing sentences, of arriving at a whole becomes greater. Yesterday I sobbed with rage before the total deficiency of my means of expression, before those synoptic sentences, without weight and saying not at all what I want. Yet I must try and have done with it.
Alberto Giacometti’s lines, so direct, are also kitschy. Suspicion: if I copied out some lines randomly from the Book of Disquiet, mightn’t I find the same? My Beloved laughed at the lines by various Pessoan heteronymns at the museum in Lisbon; how could I defend them, I wondered. They’re heteronyms, I said; they each have a different character, that quote, for example, is from a poet of nature. He’s not a real poet, but a fiction. A fiction: and wasn’t that clearest of all? That such poetry could and should not be written now (Pessoa, for me, occupies our ‘now’ – but isn’t this the most laughable idea. ‘Our’ ‘now’ … how pompous!) is clear from the first. But he is a fiction, you see, and that is everything. Pessoa did not hide behind masks, he was them, and one can say of him what Deleuze notes of Godard: that his is the most populous of solitudes, that it contains not so much ‘dreams, fantasies and projects’ but ‘acts, things, people even’. Thus the lines and philosophical essays he attributed to himself (many of them rather bad) also belong to a heteronym.
We know all this. But Giacometti’s lines? Too raw, too indulgent. He sobbed, imagine. A grown man, sobbing over some piece of prose. How laughable! There’s nothing more laughable, more indulged! And in the end, more kitschy. He belongs to a different time, doesn’t he? He’s far away from us, isn’t he? ‘I sobbed with rage …’; Beckett’s pronouncements on his work were altogether more sober. More than sober. And Van Velde’s … and Bela Tarr’s (I must collect more quotations from him) … Finer than the work itself, I sometimes think (but only because I am the greatest kind of fool).
As if what was greatest about these artists (and there are others – Duras, say) is a kind of asceticism that leads them through their art as though it preceded it; as though writing (or painting, of filmmaking) was only a means, just as Zen can combine with both the art of archery and that of flower arranging. A kind of asceticism, a great sobriety that can lead a right-wing monarchist Catholic like Blanchot, young and privileged, very far from himself. Who is he, become writer? Who does he become?
Vague questions poorly posed. But I wonder in my foolishness whether there is not a kind of ethics in writing, in filmmaking, in painting … an art of life and from the perspective of which (from its great heights) that one would not laugh at Giacometti’s prose. This question, though: are we (this ‘we’ again – how laughable!) not too late for that, too late altogether? That asceticism must also be combine with a terrible self-mockery, an unsparing suspicion as the importance of writing, of painting, of filmmaking disappears altogether (only an idiot would call himself a poet; only a fool an artist. And who could call themselves a philosopher? Laughable, all laughable).
Blanchot lived in a society where literature was important (and by this I mean that it could be new, that new writing was important; everyone (the middle class?) would have to address themselves to it). Important, prestigious … and not simply as cultural monuments to a dead past. And now? Today? Giacometti seems impossibly indulgent. I despise him even as I quote him, though I love him even in that hatred. Would I like to be able to write in that way? It is impossible, quite impossible.
Quote to set those lines on fire. Quote to sacrifice them, to let them burn right up. What heteronyms could a contemporary Pessoa find? There are none. A computer programmer in Bracknell? A management consultant in Staines? A strategic analyst in Winnersh Triangle? Laughter: there is no ‘we’, no one to deem literature important or unimportant (and even that word, literature – what pretension!). It really does not matter; nothing matters. It was all kitsch and this is a world without an art of life.
How is it possible to live except in corners and cellars? And in a corner of ourself, in a cellar under ourselves where the laughter – our own laughter does not reach. Because I am an idiot, I dream of a new kind of criticism, which begins with the total impossibility of anything like criticism. There’s no perspective, no high place, reading is an activity among others, and a poor one. Which begins from that, to lead – where? To wreck itself – where?
Stab yourself in the neck, drink until you fall over. Copy out Giacometti’s lines on the walls of your padded cell. Laughter, endless laughter: literature has a fever and is burning up. I have a fever and I’m burning up. And I’m dream of literature, of literature on fire, of a literature of those flames, written laughter, voices turned on themselves and at war, great, stupid battlefields that have long since torn us apart.
Surliness
I’ve achieved a new kind of surliness, W. observes. I make even less effort in conversation than I used to, and I was never a great conversationalist, says W., I never had any wit. But now I sit like some great surly ape making no effort whatsoever. He, on the hand, is a great maker of conversation, we both agree. He asks questions of everyone. He engages with them, it’s quite remarkable.
It must be something to do with guilt, W. reckons. His Catholicism, perhaps, or perhaps his Judaism. He is turned towards others, we agree, whereas I’m turned away from them. I tell him of the great lengths I will go to to avoid people, how I walk up unknown stairwells and through unknown corridors to avoid saying hello to a single person. What a torture it is to say hello, I tell W., who notes for his part that I never look at anyone in the face when I talk to them. You always look away, he says, like some great surly ape.
My apishness has always amused W., who likes to do impressions of me taking notes. The way you hold your pen is just like an ape, he says. And your massive arms, well they used to be massive, what’s happened to them now? It was worst in my vest phase, W. remembers, shuddering. Those vests! How many of them did you buy! 30? 40? And all of them from Primark, made by child labour, says W.
30 vests! I remind him my washing machine had broken down. It was a dark time, I say. What’s your problem with people, W. wanders. You’re a bit autistic, aren’t you? Your monomania, for example. Your obsessions. They’re a sign of autism, W. proclaims. For his part, W. is a more well-rounded person. He has a life, he says, though he notes that I have a life as well. But you’re only pretending to live, W. says, it’s not real. I have an autistic heart, W. decided long ago, and am incapable of love.
Who else would buy 30 vests?, he wonders. Or was it 40. 40 vests!, my God, says W. Of course W. has always been concerned with being a better person, an idea that must be completely alien to me, W. decides. I’m getting worse, not better, he points out. He’s even impressed. You don’t bother at all anymore, he says, it’s amazing.
Leaders
We’ve always needed a leader, W. and I agree. When we did we first decide that? Around the turn of the millennium. We were in Poland, in a big public square and it became very clear to us: we needed a leader, someone to inspire us and force us to work more. Someone to make us capable of more than we could accomplish on our own.
For his part, W. has always dreamt of being part of a pack. Friendship is very important to W.: you are to work together, to strive together, to force each other on. Friendship involves a lot of nagging, W. explains, which is why he’s so merciless with me. It’s a sign of love, he says, my nagging. But a leader, that’s what we really need, he says.
In truth, we have found several leaders. The first, far cleverer than us, far more serious, wrote a book we admired. We spoke alongside him once and were the dull panels of a tiptych. We were there only to make him shine, we agreed. It was enough to be close to our leader. But then the disaster happened, W. remembers. We told him, didn’t we?, we told him he was our leader. I remember it too. It was in a pub in Greenwich. That’s where it all went wrong. We scared him off. After that, we resolved never to tell our leaders they were our leaders, but we could never help it.
It was on another occasion in Greenwich, at another Greenwich pub that the same thing happened with our second leader. Which one of us blurted it out?, W. asks, you or me? Regardless, the spell was broken. We panicked our second would-be leader who found us worrying. He was a modest man, I remember. Greatly modest, says W., and with a deep seriousness we entirely lack. We scared him off, we agree.
And then the third leader. Ah, the third leader!, W. exclaims, the greatest one of all. We brought him half way round the world!, I say. We thought we’d justified our lives, that this was it, our high point. And what happened?, W. asks, knowing what happened. We told him all we wanted was a leader and to be led, I remember. We told him about our first leader and our second leader, and our desertion by our first leader and our second leader. Our third would-be leader was not as easily scared. But I think he wanted peers, not disciplines. Where is he now?, says W. On the other side of the world, far away from us, sensible man.
The Ovation
It’s my last visit to the Southwest in an official capacity, and I’ve left the place in ruins. Do you always have this effect?, W. asks, but I tell him it’s his fault, that if anyone wrecked everything, it was his fault. In truth, it’s the fault of people much more powerful than either of us, great wreckers, idiots who float to the top like scum and spoil it all for everyone. Why is the world run by such people?
For his part, W. led a great counterattack, it was like May ’68 all over again, W. said. He made a speech; he was admired, the floodgates opened and everyone spoke. It was like ’68!, says W., but of course it only meant he was singled out for special punishment. It’s madness, sheer madness, says W. Their incompetence! Their dishonesty! Flowcharts and piecharts and powerpoint slides can’t hide it, says W. As soon as you see a bullet point you know you might as well stab yourself in the neck.
Still, he couldn’t stand it any more, and he stoof up and spoke calmly and reasonably, but with great force, says W. He made an excellent case, the manager was worried. And he only opened the floodgates, says W., because, after his ovation, everyone started to speak. It was a great moment, though it meant absolutely nothing in the end, W. says.
We always said it, I point to W., that we succeeded at all was a monstrous aberration. It was a sign that everything was going wrong. Therefore W.’s elevation could only be the effect of a greater catastrophe. These are the end times, W. and I agree. Still, he got an ovation, says W., that was something. The floodgates opened, he says. Just like in ’68.
Troubled
We’re at the Mill on the Exe, the sun is shining warmly on our faces. We’re in a beer garden right on the river, close to the weir. The South West! W exclaims. He feels fortunate to live here. the South West is the graveyard of ambition, a colleague warned him upon his arrival from the East. But W. is not ambitious, despite his recent elevation. He reads for three hours a day, he says, and he’s content with that. In reality, he knows it’s not enough. Three hours! Rising at dawn each day!
W. remembers my years of getting up at dawn to read. What happened to you?, says W. Why don’t you do any work? I tell him I’m too busy to work, and too busy for anything. You have to be good to yourself, I tell W., especially if you’re troubled. Are you troubled, then?, says W., laughing. Oh yes, I’m definitely troubled. What are you troubled about?, asks W., still laughing. Everything troubles me. Besides, you don’t have to be troubled by anything in particular. Being troubled finds its objects, I tell W., which it seeks only to make sense of itself, even though, ultimately, there’s no making sense of itself.
W. says he’s troubled too – who isn’t? – , but that we’re not really troubled. I’m more troubled than him, though, I tell W. He says he’s always thought of me as joyful. Drunk in the sun, we offer encomiums to one another. I never make him feel anything other than joyful, says W. I tell him he is able to momentarily make me forget my troubles and that this is his great gift.
Enemies
W. has several enemies who have, at various points in his life, made his life difficult. He’s not sure what he ever did wrong, but he’s acquired enemies, much more powerful than he is. One is a Dame who sits in the House of Lords. She has a special loathing for him, he says. Another has systematically prevented W. from getting the jobs he wanted, throwing him off shortlists. Off shortlists!, exclaims W. What have I ever done to him! His enemy feels guilty, W. thinks. He thinks guiltily towards him because of his first incursion. And now, because of his guilt, he’s going to see W. fail.
Have you got any enemies?, W. asks. And remembers that I have: several, almost as many as him. W. met one at a high level meeting, he remembers. She said my name with special venom. She really hates you, says W., because of what you did to her son. I did nothing to her son, I tell W. She doesn’t believe that, he says. She says you ruined his life.
I remind W. of an enemy who set up a blog about me and wrote to me constantly. That’s the kind of person you attract, says W. They either hate you or love you. I’ve had several stalkers, I remind W. There was one person who used to speak to me through my bedroom window, when I was lying there at night. That was just your imagination, says W. No, he was quite real, I tell him. He used to tell me about the Isaac Bashevis Singer books he read through the window, I tell W. I have a special appeal for lunatics, W. notes, he’s not sure why.
The Hammock
In Portugal, I took pictures in the bookshop – of the covers of Lispector volumes, for a start, with her made-up aqualine face, very striking, and then of the recommended section, with Broch and Musil there, and plenty of Pessoa (the Pessoa museum, by the way, was a tremendous disappointment), and then, as I passed, of the readers’ room, long and narrow, and completely full of book browsers sitting in two long rows with their prizes. But then I got told off by a shop assistant, first of all in indignant Portuguese, and then, when I said I couldn’t understand, in English. No pictures were to be taken unless I asked the security guard’s permission. I felt rueful. I couldn’t take pictures? Why not?
The Portuguese are booklovers, I could tell that. Books are expensive there. I rather wanted an original Livre du Dissassego. I saw one in a pavement store. How much? 24 Euro! 24 Euro! But in the bookshops – and it was only a paperback – it cost 36. Madness. No original for me. In the flat, I read parts of Zenith’s Penguin Book of Disquiet. I don’t own a copy – it wasn’t mine. I like my Quartet Encounters edition more, underlined and annotated as it is. It bears the marks of my reading (and rereading). At one time, it was an essential book for me. Reading it now, with the Bridge of 25th April visible from the 6th floor, I remembered that first flush of readings. How old was I then? 22, I thought, or 23. Terrible years, and in which my taste in reading changed altogether. The Book was at the heart of it, I remembered. Everyting turned around the Book (but weren’t there other books, too – Kierkegaard, for example? Stages on Life’s Way? Guilty/ Not Guilty?)
I was in Pessoa’s Lisbon, had had my photograph taken next to his sculpture in the cafe, and hadn’t I bought a Pessoa teeshirt (too small, alas, though it was marked ‘L’. A child’s size, I said, giving it to my Beloved)? Pessoa! I wondered whether the name was for me only an index of a time when reading was essential, when it was at the heart of things. Zenith’s edition seemed as cool as our air-conditioned bedroom. Black covers. Many, many pages, with numbered sections. Appendices in which I would wander for hours. And a fine introduction, too, from this most admirable of Pessoa scholars. But I remembered by Quartet edition, and finding it in Manchester, in Waterstones, and reading it puzzedly, then compulsively, over and over again. The Book of Disquiet, which fell, engimatic stone, into the heart of my reading, drawing everything around it.
The Pessoa museum, as I said, was insignificant; there was nothing there. Happily, we had had a marvellous lunch in a nearby cafe – marvellous because we ate alongside office workers and ladies-who-lunch, their hair solid with hairspray, because we ate from a small menu almost identical to that of every other cafe – marvellous because it was any-cafe-whatever. We were already content, slightly drunk from the wine, well fed – fish, marvellous fish. These long lunch hours! These three hours stretched like a hammock from the poles of morning and evening!: the Portuguese knew how to live, we thought. They ate and drank a full meal at lunchtime. They met and ate and talked and drank and all of this on Pessoa’s street, on the street where he lived in his last years, when he wrote so much of his book.
On the way back to our apartment, we stopped for several hours in a park, and I looked through my photographs. Lispector! And a whole display of Pessoa’s books! What they meant to me! Or rather, what they had meant – what they meant then such that they could mean anything now, such that what reached me on the pages of a borrowed Penguin Disquiet still glowed from an older, higher reading! I was nearer the Source, I thought. Higher up, by the mountain streams, where Literature began and still begins. Why then, why there? Because of the misery of those years when my reading changed, when it changed direction – when, for all the reading I did before, what I read took on the shape of my life. Who would I be? Didn’t I learn of it then, aged 22, aged 23 …?
I was an office worker, of course. No long lunch hours dangled across the day. Work and more work – data entry, filing. What was Pessoa in all this? The opposite of ‘all this’, but whereas Bernardo Soares was imaginable in Lisbon, he was not so in Bracknell, or in Winnersh Triangle. The Book was the opposite of that world, as it might still belong in Lisbon. The opposite, and this is why Literature with a capital ‘L’, and I should say Modernism, was never a part of our lives (‘our’ because there were other readers, scattered around). Never part of it, away from it, impossibly far, but for all that, impossibly important.
Everything I read since then has been a reading of Pessoa. Everything that search for a kind of hammock in the day – not for reading, but for living of a type that was not allowed anymore. Pessoa lived on a street near the cafe. He belonged there; even Bernardo Soares had his two feet on the ground in Lisbon; he was no ghost: that’s what I tell myself this morning, however foolishly. Or he was a ghost who still belonged to a place, haunting it to show that another life was possible, that you might live in another way. But here, now? No ghosts, no possibilities; no high place to reach by way of reading.
Darkness Visible
Wasn’t I supposed to write about Golding’s Darkness Visible? Didn’t I write some notes on the inside cover as I read it over a number of afternoons in a cool room in Portugal? It began unpromisingly, didn’t it? – I couldn’t help but compare those opening pages with a bunch of conscript firemen in a bombed out London of the second world war (was it London?) with Henry Green’s Caught. Golding didn’t compare, that was until the story really began – Matty’s story, the child who came out of a fire with half his face burnt away. Who emerged, walking in a straight line, determined.
The story follows Matty now, and leaves the firemen behind, and it’s magnificently quick – sentence darts after sentence. Sentence moving quickly after sentence, and what a story, events piling on events in quickness. It’s a bit like Coetzee’s Michael K., I thought to myself. A kind of outsider character, a kind of husk, who undergoes adventures where all he does is – survive. Where he is fated to survive as though it was decided before him by the gods. Only it’s better than Coetzee’s book, which is too much like a hagiography, especially when that second narrative voice comes in, when is it, in part two or part three, the officer who captures the protagonist, who watches over and observes him in a manner too close to Coetzee’s nameless narrator. And besides, Golding’s prose is, though smooth, more rugged that Coetzee’s – it weighs more. It comes from the old earth, from the gods, from Greek tragedy and the like. There is a pagan sensibility to Golding that’s even older than the Greeks.
And so I rushed along reading, surprised, continually surprised by events. Matty’s in Australia! Matty’s been castrated by an aborigone! Matty’s back in England! Matty’s back working at a school like his old school! All wondrous, in the rush of the story. And then the marvellous passages from Matty’s diaries: he believes himself to be visited (to be called before) supernatural beings, who charge him with a supernatural task. These are pages of high imagination, who would have expected them at the unpromising beginning? What work of strange imagination! What a peculiar sensibility is Golding’s!
And then the first part of the book ends. The second part, seemingly unconnected to the first, has the same narrative momentum. It’s Sophy’s story – we don’t know who she is, but the narrative conjures her up marvellously real, beginning at her twelth year or so. But it is like reading another novel – how are these incidents related to Matty’s, and where is Matty? what’s happened to Matty, who’s quite won as over whether as protagonist of a third person narrative or as a writer of diaries. But on the story ploughs through the earth, and we still trust Golding, for Sophy is rendered very real, too marvellously, concretely real.
What happens next? Part three, and another narrative perspective. Talk starts, a great deal of windbaggery, and it is here, for me, the story has begun to scatter. Too much talk! And who cares about these characters, these dreary little-Englanders? Already we’ve had intimations of how the story of Sophy (and her twin) will join up with Matty’s. And we’ve even had a few more marvellous, moving passages from Matty’s journal (essential pages, blessed pages). But the story scatters itself with the talk, the endless talk, and now I’m thirty pages from the end, and wondering. I should go on, I know that. But I feel ill-used by Golding. Feel tricked and cheated. I want the rush of the narrative again, not talk. I want to read pages as forward-running as the best pages in Lawrence, want a story written by the most unique of sensibilities, the rarest of writers (I look at Golding’s picture for a clue to his strangenesses: I can find nothing). But the talk, the endless dreariness!
I have the book in my bag here in the office. Must finish it, I tell myself. Must finish it and put it away with The Spire, which I read only this year, very late, and that seemed to me the finest postwar English fiction I have read, and which excited me because it was English, and because I expect nothing from English letters. Must – but I feel too betrayed, too let down. So much dreary talk! I put it down in Portugal, but should pick it up back here, this grey morning, But haven’t I begun another book since (Saramago’s Blindness), and finished another (Buchner’s Lenz)? Don’t I want to begin another Golding (Paper Men, perhaps?) And isn’t there still Pincher Martin to read, a very visual novel that demands too much of one like me who can never be brought to see what would be presented to him in words?
‘Love: what is it?’
‘Beware of writers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation’, says E. M. Cioran. But how, otherwise to begin? In my notebook, the words, writing as life, and I remember Ferdinand in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (admittedly, I do so through Brody’s book, which is beside me here on my desk …) the fugitive who, having reached the idyll of the seaside, writes dreaming of a great Joycean book that would contain all of life. And Marianne, beautiful Marianne, fellow fugitive beside him in the sea crying up, ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do!’, and Ferdinand says ‘Silence! I’m writing!’
How ludicrous! A man with a notebook on a boulder, with Anna Karina wading beside him. Brody, anyway, tells us a marvellous story about Godard’s impossible love for his actress. Read the chapter on Alphaville, for example:
Most crucially, when Natasha asks Lemmy the fateful question – ‘Love: what is it?’ – Godard answers the question himself, cutting to an extraordinarily intimate close-up of Anna Karina, her face illuminated by velvetly indirect sunlight, almost out of character. It is a brief short of breathtaking beauty that shows what love is: the emotion, on the part of a filmmaker, that gives rise to such an image.
What romance! And Godard had already lost Karina by this time (I think). If I was to review Brody’s book (no time!) love would be the red thread I would follow through its pages, all the way up to Eloge de l’amour, whose love story, says Brody, ‘is Godard’s least inhibited and most ardent’. Is it possible to love a film that was almost impossible to watch (so boring, so difficult to follow, I who can barely tell the characters apart in an ordinary thriller)? Is it that I watched this film because I wanted to have watched it so as to read and write about it? How ludicrous! How stupid!
Brody’s book, anyway, carried me happily through a difficult time. Sometimes books can do that, and they’re worth looking out for, joining up hours and afternoons and days that would otherwise fall apart. Sometimes you need to find a power of narrative that is more powerful than you, and sweeps you up in its own arms. And when you finish it, you’re locked out, and there’s no way in again, except to read back where you’ve annotated it, and perhaps copy our parts of it, the better to remember what happened.
Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to expresss themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Plaintive voices are very important, not just poetically but historically and socially, because they express a movement of subjectification (‘poor me …’): there’s a whole order of elegiac subjectivity.
Maybe I should explain my image of Godard. As someone who works a great deal, he must be a very solitary figure. But it’s not just any solitude, it’s an extraordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative solitude.
Narrative Eternity
Was that really a book? Is it really over? Naipaul’s A Bend in the River ends uncertainly. Oh, not because the story was unresolved in any important way: we know the protagonist will go to England to marry the daughter of his friend as he promised (as was an informal arrangement). He’ll get out of the new Africa that grew up all around him – around this son of an old Muslim family on the East coast of the continent, a family who had moved there generations ago from India, and had kept their traditions intact.
In the opening chapters, the protagonist-narrator allows himself to speak from those traditions, to speak corporately, collectively, in the third person plural. Why, I asked myself as I read, is he writing? Why the necessity to write? He doesn’t tell us (the composition of the novel plays no part in the novel); but I suppose because his voice had to coalesce from the new uncertainty that had shaken up those traditions.
His family had to move from the East coast, just as he, in the end, will have had to leave his shop and his business in the town in the bend of the river. And not just his family: the Big Man of the capital, the new President has turned his poor country, post-independence, upside down. All the old certainties are gone. Then our narrator speaks from this overturning. Speaks as an individual who was at first an onlooker, and then fell victim to it. The novel, which begins slowly, happily, gathers pace. At the end, everything happens at once, all in a rush. Salim, our narrator, now a man alone, has had to escape. He departs on the steamer, upriver, the Big Man having commandeered the available aeroplanes.
But though the narrative speeds up, its coolness and detachment does not change; its careful ‘brown style’ (a measured, unelaborate prose, still and reserved) remains unruffled. The events in question did not disturb it. Even when Salim finds himself without a business, even when he’s lost in a crowded prison, nothing changes its coolness, its detachment. The prose flows on. And I wonder whether it was this that I wanted to continue, as I put the book down.
The mood of a book (its many moods) remain for a while after reading. I’d finished A Bend in the River at the airport. On the way home, in the taxi, still the mood (the many moods). And still the desire to be sustained by that tranquil prose, by the same calm continuity that allowed everything to be spoken, whether slowly or quickly. Initially, Salim spoke in the third person plural – collectively, corporately, in the knowledge of who he was and what he could expect. Then as the book moved on, this shifted to the first; Salim was a man alone. But there were passages, nonetheless, where something else spoke, or another voice inhabited that of the narrator. These were the transitional passages, the literary equivalent of the ‘pillow shots’ of Ozu: descriptive moments that might seem to have been intercalated between narrative episodes.
Another ‘we’ speaks: but who speaks? Not the ‘we’ of the eternal Africa, the jungle and the river. The narrator wants to note the changes in the vegetation – the new hyacinths the river carries along. He wants us to know the bush is changing. His is not an eternal Africa, then. Not the Jungle without variation. Things are happening, changing, just as a narrative – A Bend in the River itself – opens its wings in the ramshackle town in the bend of the river. Why did I want to remain there, in the river’s bend, where the ‘we’ had not resolved itself into an ‘I’; where the bush spoke, the ramshackle town, and the foreigners Salim found stranded there? Why in that narrative eternity, in that eternal noon that, in my memory, burns everything else away?
A lovely sentence from Brody’s book on Godard,
Duras herself recognised that ‘the film was made at the same time as it was filmed; the film was written in step with its unspooling’, and criticised directors who did not understand ‘that the making of the film is already the film’.
And now a passage which makes me think of Tarkovsky’s Mirror:
For Godard, Duras represented a model of integrating his own private experience with the work of art without sacrificing any of its political or vatic power. He had criticised Sartre, in the wake of 1968, for having distinguished his writing of the time (his biography of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family) from his political activism – for having two separate ‘drawers’: a ‘Flaubert drawer’ and a ‘class struggle’ drawer. Duras made no such distinction: Le Camion, a story of a woman who hitches a ride with a pair of truck dirvers, is dominated by the political delusions of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, without yielding to dogma or diluting the film’s artistic immediacy – and Duras told that story herself, on-screen. Adapting Duras’s strategies, Godard, beginning with Sauve qui peut, would approach politics by other means, creating feature films that reflected his first-person implication in their subjects, however great or abstract.
Pauline Kael in The New Yorker on one of my favourite Godard films, Sauve qui pert (la vie), called Slow Motion in the UK and Every Man for Himself in the USA:
More than the fat has been burned out of Every Man For Himself: the juice has gone, too … If it were possible to have lyricism without emotion, that might describe the film’s style … I got the feeling that Godard doesn’t believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn’t really believe in movies anymore, either.
What would it mean to write without believing in writing? Doesn’t Godard say elsewhere he intends to make cinema rather than films (writing rather than books)?
… after making For Ever Mozart, he contacted Otchakovsky-Laurent again to say that he now wanted to create a book of ‘sentences’ from that film and to do so the same for other works of his. The publisher prepared a manuscript of For Ever Mozart, and Godard removed all descriptions and stage directions, ‘everything except what is said in the film’. Then he rearranged the spoken text in a process which Otchakovsky-Laurent described as ‘an authentic work of versification’. The result did not resemble a published script; the sentences, broken into short, unpunctuated lines, without attribution to the characters, indeed resemble poetry. Godard expressed his satisfaction with the result, declaring, ‘These are sounds and phrases which correspond to a type of diction, my own’. The genre under which the book is listed is also Godard’s pown – ‘phrases’, that is, sentences, – although many of the book’s phgrases, or sentences, were not his own: the book features a list of sixteen cited authors, including Georges Bernanos, Marguerite Duras, James Agee and André Bazin.
(from Richard Brody’s admirable Everything is Cinema.)
Now isn’t that beautiful: the idea of a voice that occupies every particular voice in a work of art? Of a narrative voice that even gathers up what is quoted. Phrases – to be capable of a book of sentences written by no one and by everyone.
Passage
No easy way to get back to writing. I had made a mental note to look up Scott Walker’s words (at the time of Tilt or The Drift?) of wanting no separation between music and his life, thinking, that’s it, that’s the beginning of something. (‘Is there an element of putting on the work clothes when it’s time to record, then?’ – ‘I’m trying to get rid of that. I’m try to reach a state of neutrality where I’m living my work, existing within it and for it. I’m trying not to make a separation between the two.’) What would I have said? No separation between writing and life. The two absolutely equivalent. To write, to live, and both at once.
And another note, this time from Balthus: ‘I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream’. To write about the passing of writing itself, not of what might be written, that’s what I would have said. Beginning from the living room, here, the new printer to be used for printing wedding invitations, the dresser, the antique brass lamp brought back from Lisbon. Beginning only to have said it was writing of which I wanted to write – the passing of writing over these and other objects, touching them without disturbing them. Writing as it stays with them, these objects, when I am away.
Then a scribbled note to myself on an old notebook: difficulty of reaching a blank page. Even reaching it. What did I mean? That to bring oneself to the edge of a beginning is already a great deal. That it’s enough to mark that beginning, to write to say – nothing in particular. And finally, a thought last night: the impossibility of writing a diary. Of allowing one voice to still itself and speak, usurping all the others. To speak from one voice – it’s not enough. The beginning is at the brink of all voices, of any possible voice. And just because it is at that brink, the voice of writing, of writing writing itself, as it allows those voices. Stay close, then, to the possibility of a voice, of writing, where anything you might say will be arbitrary.
From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:
– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.
I could add a hundred more, two hundred more shades to my personality … each one independent of the others, following a path of its own.
Of what literary expression would I be capable? How could I fend for myself in these conditions?
A Frenchman or an Englishment never experiences such lack of harmony – at least not to this extent. Whatever a Frenchman or an Englishman might feel individually, even if he is profoundly torn within himself, he will aways seek refuge in a certain national, English or French form, which has been elaborated over the centuries.
I was Polish.
Gombrowicz's Polishness, his disharmony means any beginning is an arbitrary one, and the attempt to finish a book in the same style (the same shade) is only an arbitrary effort of will.
Toy Stars, Real Stars
There are books you have to stoop to read; you can't stand up straight. Kafka's aphorisms, say. Late Mandelstam poems. Tsvetayeva 's long poems. Books that are their own law, their own religion. That seem to press further into themselves, and all the same to have reached something – a solitary point, burning alone in the sky. A star that burns into itself, falling endlessly into its own idiom. And separated from us in so many ways, not least the great, burning catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it is not as if you have to part veil after veil to find them – learning German, learning Russian, learning the history of Prague, or the history of St. Petersburg. They burn through all veils and that is the point. They reach us somehow, and as themselves, absolutely themselves.
Laughter. What nonsense! As though you could gather the 'treasures of world literature' around you like gems. As though that gathering, the act of looking for 'literature' – or the pretense that it actually came to find you, shining through all the veils - was not a horrible kind of acquisitiveness. Some books you have to lose to find. Some books will not tolerate being placed alongside others on the shelves. Nothing worse than a collector of books, than a sniffer after old editions. Nothing worse than the literary fantasist who dreams the classics burn around him like the toy stars on a child's bedroom ceiling.
Toy stars, real stars. I'm not sure what kind of constellation my bookshelf collects. Fake or real? What am I looking for as I read? What do I want to find?
‘I have a Project’
It will never happen, that's what this day says to me. Never – but what, what isn't to happen? Behind every word here – or ahead of them, far out ahead like a sail: the 'project' – is that the word? I don't like that word. The project – something thrown out ahead. A fishing net? Can a sail be thrown out ahead? Ahead and catching the wind, dragging everything here behind it?
Now I imagine the spread parachute like sail of the land yachts that race along the sand. Ahead – but it's not even real, I don't think it's real. Ahead and uncertain, yet dragging everything along: what. 'I have a project': so says the character in Godard's Eloge de l'amour. Red Thread(s) quoted that a long time ago, just that, the character (Edgar?) saying, 'I have a project'. But do I have one? It will never happen, that's what this long drooping Sunday says to me. You'll never do it, never complete it. But what? Complete what?
This is it, I want to say. These words are what it is, and nothing beyond them. And yet the sense that there's a kind of shadow that they belong to. That their real sense lies beyond them, to something that has already happened, and can only make sense in that way. Ruined words – remnants – but from some disaster that will happen in the future, not the past. That is gathering itself in order to happen. That sucks the air away from the present as a tsunami is said to do, drawing the air into itself before the wave crashes on the beach.
The Membrane
My Golding phase has run aground on Pincher Martin. Is running aground, because it hasn't defeated me yet; I'm a hundred pages in, and, like its central character, trying to get a grip – on a narrative, not on his rocky outcrop. A grip - but unlike him, I can find no purchase; the narrative, such as it is, runs on without me. Pages of closely printed prose (in a fifty year old Penguin paperback – what history did it have?, I wonder) like a shut door. His rocky island is my glass mountain.
Naipaul, instead, and on a whim, after idly reading some article or another. I selected A Bend in the River from Waterstone's shelves. The girl at the checkout desk she'd always meant to read Naipaul, and I said so had I. Of course, I'd gone 100 pages into The Enigma of Arrival – what defeated me? A lack of abstraction, I think – a lack of prose doing more than being a perfect, perfect mirror. The prose was too balanced! It made me seasick, those calm, calm waters of prose. The book fell away from my grasp as into a pool of water. Let it lie there forever, I thought.
But this rainy morning, I thought to advance a little further into A Bend, having begun it yesterday in the gym. And I'm almost immediately upset – seeking to open the spine a bit wider, to give myself room to read the end of each line, too cramped against the central margin, I fold it open instead and – it cracks. The glue of the book has failed; it's come apart from itself. A broken book. It seems at odd with its calm, calm prose.
I like narratives in the first person, and like it when it is not the protagonist who is the centre of action, but whose presence asserts itself gently nonetheless. Who is there, with you, the reader, watching it all, reliving it all, for doesn't the narrative depend upon an act of writing, a retelling?
I like the way that voice seems to withdraw back from the story, seems to be much more than a frame. The voice seems to speak from a voice deeper than any reported one in what follows. It becomes an echo chamber, a space of resonance, having hollowed out an unexpected interiority because of the power – a controlled power, very measured, in Naipaul's case – to tell.
But an interiority that is not quite a soul, not a private recess set back from the world. A kind of membrane instead, infinitely delicate. A membrance between inside and outside, and that, as it quivers, speaks of what we do not ordinarily call personality but should – the way the world registers with us. The way it affects us individually, absolutely alone.
This is what gives itself as style. This is what can make a voice, reading a voice, hearing it as you read, absolutely essential. I think of the Richard Ford trilogy, for all its uncertainties (the weak satire in the third volume, the overlong second volume), and, in particular, of The Sportswriter. That voice, that voice, what I wouldn't do to feel close to it again, Frank Bascombe's voice, that membrane between the world and himself that gives itself as style.
Naipaul's narrator is cooler, more distant. I do not feel an immediate love for this voice, and wonder whether it will come. It reminds of Radio 4, of the calm voice of the radio announcer. A calmness not on the side of style, but of a studied neutrality – the stylelessness of a ruling class, of an unchallenged middle class. Certain, self-certain, but so certain it does not need to draw attention to itself. It simply is what it is, calm and unruffled.
Brown prose, I think it's called sometimes. Measured prose. The prose of rulers, resounding with the voice of rulers. Will I finish Naipaul's book? It cost eight pounds, so I will make sure to. Eight pounds! From Waterstones! And this for a paperback whose glue does not hold its page batches to the back cover! But it is not an essential book. Its calm, calm voice is not necessary.
Now, fool, I say to myself. Now – what makes Richard Ford so different? The Sportswriter? Because that space of resonance, that stretched eardrum has a kind of density, I reply, a thickness. It has been infested with itself – it is thick. It has style – or has accrued style to itself, attracted it like a fly to stick flypaper. This is not the style of a ruler-writer. It is in lieu of itself, it looks for itself, as Frank Bascombe lives in search of – what?
I read the three Bascombe volumes after one another. What happiness! I miss them. I miss that thickened voice, looking for itself in the narrative. Looking without knowing what was to happen, what must happen. It knew nothing of plot. What happened – happened. The interminable house-selling episodes in the third volume. The interminable drive in the second. Ah but what happiness in the last chapter of The Sportswriter – a miracle, when the narrator catches a train on a whim to 'Gotham'. A miracle, because here the plot, in its detour, thickens as wonderfully as the prose. Chance, contigency here doubles the contingency of style, style's adventure, as it accretes itself in darkness and silence.
What are you on about, idiot?, I ask myself. What are you trying to find? Sunday morning. The wet yard. Flowers in pots, there for one season only. And a flowering plant – bright light purple. And the trimmed down Hebes. And the big tubs bought for salad, new sprouts poking up. The wet concrete. The bench my sister painted 6 years ago that needs painting again, detritus beneath it in piles beneath the gaps between slats above. A day like any other.
I was reading in the other room. Reading on the bed, as I never do when my Beloved is around. But she's not here and nor is that measure of reality she brings. Am I becoming 'dreamy' as Bascombe says happens to him? Dreamy … a membrane stretched out like a hammock. A living style, that does not know itself. An idiom that thickens into life. To read is also to write, isn't it? To be written in some way? To find oneself written?
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