termed Hollow's Cottage

The characters in Shirley have been written so that they push, push, push, into a future where they will be better-known, better-seen, better-realised; even the obnoxious clergyman who insults Shirley in her home is trying to reach a better future state. The author has decided that this clergyman doesn't deserve to succeed, her opinion manifests itself fictionally in the hostess who tells him to leave. Charlotte Brontë is one of the condemning authors, like D.H. Lawrence.

They push steadily, either a thrusting shove or a stymied thrusting shove (see: Caroline in despair), and there is always more that could be revealed to the reader if these people could take another step in their lives, if Caroline could convince Robert to marry her, for instance, then the reader would be allowed to experience a relaxation of tension and a wedding. They butt against the frustration of being poor or being jobless, they thrust and stew until force is the main character in the book, it is there all the way through, it is there on every page; it even fills the clouds and the weather. "Rain has beat all day on that church tower."

This frustration and pushing is very steadily applied, "the revolt of its pride was seen in the heaving of her heart, stirred stormily under the lace and silk which veiled it," and Shirley is not spasmodic like Irene Iddesleigh, the author's sympathy doesn't suddenly come and go; her withdrawal of interest in Caroline after Shirley has arrived does not happen immediately, the newcomer gradually increasing her grip on the real estate of pages, she is rich there too and not only in her inherited property, "an excellent cloth-mill, dyehouse, warehouse, together with the messuage, gardens, and outbuildings, termed Hollow's Cottage;" O she gets chapters, page-property, Caroline shrivelling away in the background for the love of Robert until her long-lost mother decides that she is going to provide this weakening and declining part of the story with a modicum of filler. Darling, she cries, starting from her blind.

This mother comes so close to the land of utter revelation that all the characters are straining for that she goes from a mild character into a ferocious one and seizes her child carnivorously. "I am your true mother. No other woman can claim the title; it is mine."

But the love for Robert will be answered eventually, X will marry Y, the characters are galloping towards the end of the book, when they will be terminated, the pages are holding them back, the characters are trying to bite through, all Very Hungry Caterpillars, and shortcut their way, Caroline pining and trying to die because she is not allowed to reach the final chapter. She has to be restrained so that two engagements can happen more or less at the same time, hers and Shirley's: the author wants it that way, and holds her back temporarily from that oblivion.

I know that Brontë wants it that way because that's the way she does it, very starkly, not in a confused subliminal way but deliberately as if to plan, even though it means she has to fade her old main character out of the story nearly utterly. Caroline becomes sick, she has to go to bed, she receives her mother like a consolation prize or muzzle, keeping her so satisfied that she doesn't have a place among the strivers any more, surrendering with an exclamation, "My mother -- my own mother!" She can be left to her rest, which is like a small version of death, everybody gradually forgetting you.

so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship

I want to marry my tutor, thinks Irene Iddesleigh, and so does the title character of another book, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, a fictional woman who made the name Shirley popular with the parents of real baby girls; those girls burped and farted in their bassinets, two feats that the fictional Shirley would never achieve, never burping herself, never associated by her god-author with the word fart, though she is allowed to claim the words "brilliant, and probably happy," "independent as to property," "surefooted and agile; she could spring like a deer when she chose," and she possesses other features or attributes that the real girls might not have possessed.

Shirley is the second-appearing significant woman in the book; the first is Caroline who lives in the neighbourhood where Shirley has her property. "The very first interchange of slight observations sufficed to give each an idea of what the other was."

It's the same way in Jeannie Gunn's 1908 book, We of the Never-Never, all of her stockmen so taciturn that an "interchange of slight observations" makes them friends for life with the author (not the author but the author's fictional substitute) when she arrives at their cattle station saying "How do you do" -- a stockman coughs and grins -- "It was a most eloquent grinning, making all spoken apology or explanation unnecessary; and by the time it had faded away we thoroughly understood each other, being drawn together by a mutual love of the ridiculous. Only a mutual love of the ridiculous, yet not so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship as appears, and by no means an uncommon one 'out bush.'"

Some of the men are so shy that they dodge her for days or weeks after she gets there but then they talk about horses briefly and the friendship exists: it lasts forever, the mob of them go cattle-mustering, the woman from the city camps under a tree with her swag, her husband owning the place, the cattle, and the trees.

This is almost the only point where I can put together a formula to make the two books touch, Shirley and We of the Never-Never, otherwise they are not alike; Shirley's essence is a pushing-forward movement being thwarted; We of the Never-Never wants its people to stay still, stay still, keep their attributes intact, and display, and reinforce -- "But a Fizzer without news would not have been our Fizzer." It has a deep love of the same event, in other words, nostalgia, the clock hand that always comes back to twelve.

These linkages appear like theorums in bureaucracy or physics, only regarding or explaining the points that coincide with their equations, then lighting a small aura-area around them, the rest of each book is dark matter, obscured even further perhaps if you put several titles together in a genre, listing Shirley next to Irene Iddesleigh in a list called, "Books about women who want to marry their tutors," or you could extend the formula by calling it, "Books about people who marry the teacher-employees in their families," which means you could include Ada Cambridge's Materfamilias, and add the first two lines to your list, explaining that if you cut off the rest of the book these two lines would be a short story by Lydia Davis. "My father in England married a second time when I was about eighteen. She was my governess." It was for the sake of those two lines that you changed the name of the list to get the Lydia Davis comment in there, which you think is a brainwave, then you have doubts, you wonder if it was really a brainwave, you think about changing the name of the list back again but by now you have already spent half an hour hunting down ten more names to justify the new title and you don't want to get rid of them -- anyway -- you think -- maybe somebody will be impressed -- but already you are lugubrious with regret like Eeyore and you haven't even put it out there yet.

along the carpeted floor on hands and knees

One alliterative name occurs to Amanda McKittrick Ros with an I and then a while later another one occurs with an O so she puts them in; but during the period between those two times no alliterative names occur to her, and so the rich aristocrat doesn't have one. Random: that's how it seems. Bourne on waves. Maybe she had a reason. She will put a metaphor inside a sentence that does not need that potency there; the knowledge will come to her that a bed can be described as a boat of dreamland and so a minor character will fall asleep like this --

Divesting herself of her clothing, Rachel soon put herself in a position to guarantee slumber. She wrapped herself well within the fleecy folds of nature, and in less than ten minutes was safely sailing in the boat of dreamland.

(You could say that sleep itself is the boat of dreamland, not the material object known as a bed, but I'm going to associate the phrase with this bed nonetheless.)

The other characters, even the most important ones, will continue to sleep on normal beds unless a new formula arrives in the author's invention, then they will fall asleep on the new formula. If a new formula never occurs then it will be normal beds forever. Her metaphors never seem preordained, or in other words natural, but they flare out spontaneously and distantly, alienated in their setting, like a fit of epilepsy suddenly on a street. The metaphor'd object does not have to be valuable to the plot, or to anything except itself; it is isolated now in itself, the depth or extension or life she gives to this object is rooted in someone else's version of a fantasy, the idea of a bed as a boat that sails you away to a land of dreams is not uncommon, the author not reaching very far to find the shapes of these decorations, she goes to the closest shop for Christmas streamers, inserting them without any sensitivity toward their setting, and I remember Henri Bergson in his book on laughter arguing that people laugh when they see flexibility being arrested or interrupted or invaded by signs of the mechanical: rigidity, repetition, and automatic reproduction. "The more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the comic effect."

So I consider the idea of Amanda McKittrick Ros as a machine, mechanically reproducing the effects that have worked for other authors.

The choice of effects is not mechanical: the machine favours alliteration over other techniques, for example. It has its human preferences.

The human preferences are Bergson's "flexibility," the reproduction of the effects is the machine, and Ros brings them close together. Irene Iddesleigh is a uniting agent.

Then the laughter of the Inklings and the laughter of the critics, and the laughter of myself even while I admire (not ironically, not mockingly) the words "icy heights" in her description of Irene Iddesleigh's servant Marjory waiting under the bed and escaping with Rachel's key. And I feel the stairs transformed into Alps.

Marjory, for it was she who lay stretched under the bed of her who never at any time doubted her word or actions, when fully convinced of Rachel’s safe retirement, crept along the carpeted floor on hands and knees, carrying with her the key to victory. Proudly and much agitated did Marjory steal her way along the many winding corridors of carpeted comfort, until at last she came to the bottom of the ghost-like marble steps which led to her mistress; and swiftly running up the icy heights, until reaching the door of danger and blood-thirsty revenge, she, with the caution of a murderess, thrust with great and exceptional care the key into its much-used opening, and heroically succeeded in gaining admittance.

The sequence of events has been directing the reader's attention towards a part of the bed that is not incorporated in the words "boat of dreamland." The top of the bed is the dreamland-boat; that part where the dreamer will stow the sleeping body. The person who is reading for plot is not supposed to care about the top. The plot-reader is supposed to be wondering about the space between the floor and the bottom of the mattress where Marjory is trying not to give herself away. That's where the drama is taking place. The top is less important.

The metaphor-reader is a different person, the metaphor reader doesn't care about the bottom, the metaphor-reader cares about the top.

The words "boat of dreamland" are not important to the plot but they are important to the language universe in a way that is obscure to the reader and yet native to Ros, who swims in that universe like a fish on the other side of the glass that is in front of me: I see it behave, I can deduce that the behaviour is important to the fish's welfare, but the fish is a fish and its gestures are puzzling, they seem abrupt and astonishing, at first she thinks Irene is commendable in the escape scene but some time afterwards she decides that the escape was the act of a moral cripple, the action the same, the attitudes utterly different, as if two woman have escaped and not one, and in fact there is not one Irene Iddesleigh in this book, there are many, all with the same name.

The author admires one woman, distances herself from another woman, thinks one of them deserves to die, thinks one of them deserves to be happy, addresses them functionally as separate beings, and calls them all Irene.

and ends, as it should commence

The skeleton of Irene Iddesleigh's plot is familiar, the pieces have been plucked up on the roadside like Cheval's rocks: the poor orphan woman Irene has to marry the rich aristocrat even though she really loves a humbly-situated tutor.

But the author adds a surprise that is not a plot twist or anything literary: the tutor's name is Oscar Otwell and the uncanniness of one alliteration falling in love with another alliteration is a conundrum with no answer.

The writing is never conscious of it, Ros never jokes about it, she never suggests that these two people belong together because of their vowels, the proximity is a red herring, it seems to be hinting at an answer, and a writer who did not want the reader to think about it would not have put those names together like that and yet she does not seem to want us to think about it, yet she does put them close together like that, apparently stimulated by a natural impulse that said, "Do this, do this, write an alliteration, write more alliterations," -- so she writes --

The silvery touch of fortune is too often gilt with betrayal: the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride: the impostury of position is petty, and ends, as it should commence, with stirring strife. But conversion of feminine opinions tries the touchy temper of opposition, and too seldom terminates victoriously.

She is never ironic at her own expense, she uses a grandly dramatic vocabulary, she invents aphorisms, all techniques that have worked for other people but they don't work for her, critics laugh, Tolkien laughs, I laugh, but where does that accent of instinct come from, what country, what nation, what coastline, what climate?

Not Oxford, where the Inklings were sitting, not that cluster of foreign nations with its don-atmosphere. Not any nonmysterious place. But somewhere so strange that it shortcircuited itself and vanished.

the worst author

So say there are accents of different kinds pushing the energy of a book in one direction or another direction; there is the author's personal accent, the accent of the tempo on the page, the accent of Johannes Bobrowski in Levin's Mill, the accent-adopting accent of Vivienne Cleven in Bitin' Back, the accent of Dostoevsky (I read The Idiot earlier this year), the accent of Tolstoy; and sometimes an article in a magazine will ask you to choose: are you a Dostoevsky person or a Tolstoy person, where do you migrate, which accent, which area of what probability, which field of exclusion, which coastline, which natural features, which diet, which culture's habits? Where will you live?

(I will not live anywhere. I think I will migrate like a bee.)

As I am reading I am trying mechanically to decipher a personality, not the author's; it is as though I am staring at a face, or in other words consulting a map covered with geographical representations, knowing that it is not the earth. In May Seraillon pointed me at Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittrick Ros, "the worst author in the English language" -- is her reputation -- the Inklings used to read her and laugh -- what a picture, these dons laughing at that woman who had made her patchwork so seriously and faithfully, like someone patching a religion together out of bits and pieces they've discovered and treasured, having faith in those patches, as she evidently did, putting them next to one another humourlessly and continuing on through the strange juxtapositions as if those juxtapositions were not happening, and as if the familiarity of her materials had blinded her to the possibility that they might not fit together -- as if she might say, "I see them in the world together all the time, they are always suitable" -- this absolute faith that one popular object would go together with another popular object and the Faithless Mother storyline would adhere to the Bluebeard Husband storyline with a kind of magical popularity-glue.

Or think of Grimm's fairytales before they were polished and regulated, the strange twists, the remarks like cul de sacs, possibly responding to a desire or question from the oral-story audience in the originals, the odd remark hardening there like a cast around the shape of the question, Ros's brain travelling through the shapes of motifs she'd seen in the books she knew (she was not a broad reader, writes Seraillon) and Irene Iddesleigh hardening around them, the brain removing itself, the cast remaining.

"Outsider art," wrote Tom, and he is right, Ros takes her forms from the established world but the way she assembles and fills them is personal and not normal; it must respond to a personal fantasy. Ferdinand Cheval built his palace out of the rocks he took home from the roadways in his wheelbarrow, one rock started it, a rock with a strange shape like the bark of a fir tree, discovered by himself, then the palace developing over thirty-three years, a little Southeast Asian maybe, a sort of jungle vision in a French paddock. Henri Rousseau, who found himself entering a dream, he said, when he visited the hectares of botany in the Jardin des Plantes, responded to his fantasies by painting tropical landscapes; and the animals in them he never saw unless stuffed or caged, though in the paintings free.

He deserved to be a member of the Academy, he said, an ambition that seemed realistic to him; Ros wondered if she would win a Nobel prize but never did she win one.

Yet if they are both supreme manifestations of themselves (forcing this Themselves idea through into the solid world as Mervyn Peake's characters do without thinking, and Peake's characters are best at this when they are static or hardened, before they begin to change in Gormenghast, book two, when the idea of the ultimate concrete Self begins to withdraw from other people and make itself problematic in Titus) and if they have miraculously emerged from the detritus of the world shining their personal lights through a mass of stuffed animals, public gardens, forest photographs and other objects that have tried to mob them in the same way that these same objects have already mobbed others, and smothered others, and clung to them, shaping them, worrying them, but these two dove into the detritus of the world and dominated it baroquely into their own images until it lay demurely astonished by the transformation that violates the nice guidelines of taste, then what further prize could we give them I ask you, when they have already mistaken all the world for their own property?