subject us further to its power

Whatever is going to be, is learning from what is; whatever is happening is possessed by whatever has already happened, and "If each word wins us a victory over nothingness, it is only to subject us further to its power", wrote Cioran the pessimist. Nothing is fated until it happens. Everything present is its own premonition. The ruin from Ossian occurred to the writer of Romance, and I was interested to see that Ann Wroe in her book on Shelley described the poet working in a way that was not like that Radcliffian leap from one phrase into another; instead, she said, he would mark down the rhythm of the poem (that was the main thing, the propelling thing) and spaces were often left blank, waiting to be filled in later with some word that wouldn't sound out of place.

Before this I imagined Marguerite Young rolling from word to word in her sentences but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling depends so much on rhythm that the Shelley method could have been used instead and it would have had the same result: she could have written it one way or the other way, and there is no rule that says you have to write one word after another, or even a book in order. John Crowley once said that he starts his books in the middle, and the landscape to right and left of that island a whitened tundra where the moss whistled to the wind.

So the shape of a finished thing doesn't always let you know how it was done, and mystery novels, no matter how many observed details they include, will never be realistic; they are attuned to an a-real philosophy, or a hopeful one.

All of Young's words are her own, she's not a quoter, or if she's quoting or misquoting excerpts then she doesn't give herself away. She resuses herself but not anyone else; large areas of Miss MacIntosh are made of words that have already been used, as all books are, if you want to be pedantic, everybody lifting everybody else's "the" and "but" and "I", doing this without remorse or shame because nobody ever detects them, or everybody does but nobody calls them out, we are this collective of thieves, and you have to reach a higher status of word before people start shouting plagiarism or sequel. You have to reach the arena of proper names, and even then you can disguise it. I could write a serious book about a girl named Alicia and, as long as I was careful, nobody would know that she belonged to Lewis Carroll, whose own name cannibalised the words Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

"This pseudonym was a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes," explains somebody on his Wikipedia page. They refer you to Morton Cohen's 1996 book Lewis Carroll: a Biography for proof, but none of the Carroll biographies I've been able to actually get my hands on around here will support the theory, although they don't support any other theory either, they just don't mention it at all. In my local Carroll biographies it's as if he pulled the name out of nowhere and relied on nothing, nothing inspired him, there was no forerunner, only pure Carroll.



(n.b. Wroe's book is an alchemical biography, Becoming Shelley, devoutly researched, which is more than I did for those Carroll biographies, scuffling around in the UNLV library among the England 1800s shelves under D, Dodgson, with the black weight of Dickens falling to my left and Eliot nesting like Eagles on the right.)

lives set into the bowl

I believe that there are some things we do naturally; we see faces in everything, and personalities; I say look at any piece of wood and you'll find a mouth or a profile. Next to the Methodist church I noticed two sets of cardboard eyelashes attached to a parked car above the headlights, fixed there, curled up a little prettily, as though the lights were eyes and the wires running behind them went back into a brain that sat under the hood coming to its own conclusions about the driver.

For a thing with a face has a brain, and that brain might be dictating its behaviour, the eye of the watching person wants to predict the intentions of the creatures standing nearby, from which it can judge its position in the world, a desire that does not seem to end when those things are trees or cars or stains on the wall, in other words they are genuinely brainless: and I think: what a longing we must have for faces and expressions, which we want to mistake for books in which the mind can be read. Look at my dog, said a man in the room with me on the weekend: she's smiling. The dog was pulling its lips back. "A lizard," wrote Martial in his Epigrams, "fashioned by Mentor, lives set into the bowl; and we fear the silver." Inserta phialae Mentoris manu ducta / lacerta vivet et timetur argentum.

I can discover an emotion anywhere, I can look at a sentence and call the writer happy or angry, believing with an instant instinct that if I met them they would behave in such and such a manner consistent with their sentences. Which character would you like to have a beer with, journalists ask their readers in an intimate written voice; which man from Austen would you want to date, Mr Darcy or the one in Emma? It is as if there is really a man in the book, and the question they ask is the question they ask real people about real men: who would you date, why do you like them, and how will you exercise your discrimination? A question followed by an answer is one of the simplest forms of story, a beginning followed by an end, with the middle occupied by mechanics of consideration.

The question is a prompt, the prompt preemptively places whatever is said next into a certain category of utterances, and grammar itself is a system of prompts, asking the question, what is this? and answering, it is a noun, until everybody who reads Jabberwocky knows that tove is not an adjective. Individual words seem to have characters too, the word slithy, for instance, which leads me to another question, which is: if we can imagine that these words are flavoured with largeness or sneakiness, or, in mimsy, twee, then do we also think they have their own brains, and if they don't have brains then where do we think those innate qualities are generated?

Marguerite Young worked out how to build a sentence that ran very purely on prompts. There was that one from the chapter about the bus driver, "His hair had grown three inches since he left Persia at sunset, just when the sun was setting over the empty box factory, over the bare razorback hills snouting like wild pigs against the dark sky, over the trees naked of flowers, the leafless bushes, the foundry that had no bricks and no fires and the bell-tower that had no bells and the flour mill where the flour was black as coal dust ..." the earlier words predicting the later ones, "no fires" triggering "no bells," "trees" igniting "bushes," but the nouns themselves don't intimately matter, as long as they can attach themselves to the nouns before, throwing out their hooks like mountaineers climbing up from nonlife into life; the bushes after the trees would work as well if the bush was a different kind of plant. The sentence could even have accommodated more plants. It would have been larger but not deformed. The sentence is a perpetual motion machine. As long as she can find a word that can be coupled with a previous word then this machine won't finish itself naturally; she'll have to make the decision herself, cutting into its momentum, and leaving the ghost of the longer sentence behind, an impossible sentence that never ends.

And there are other ways for a word to bring another word into the world, the rules of different poetic forms can encourage one word to appear and another word never to make its appearance, a fact that was made even clearer to me when I read the footnotes for D.R. Shackleton Bailey's Loeb translation of the Epigrams, and saw that the Roman had been forced to use allusive language in several of his tiny works because there were words that would not fit his meter.*

Would the sunlight in Thomas Grey's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard still have fallen on the lawn if it had been shining at midday and not at dawn? Would the wren in Sounds Assail Me by Oodgeroo Noonuccal have sung a song, if human beings did not know evil and wrong? If people were sweet, the wren would have said tweet. That wren is the slave of comprehension. The brain of the wren is the writer.



* Being annoyed at them was a joke he used at least twice. "That noble, soft, and dainty name I wished to put into polished verse," he wrote in Book IX, referring to the word Ěǎrǐnos, or Spring. "But, contumacious syllable, you rebel. And yet poets say Eiarinos; but they are Greeks to whom nothing is denied, whom it beseems to chant 'Ǎres, Ǎres.' We, who cultivate more austere Muses, cannot be so clever."

is a monsoon

So Marguerite Young puts her characters together out of contradictions but the element of stability is there in each of them; always a contrast-element in the middle of those stormy fights (detecting fight in the work of the poet Allen Tate: "Tate the truth-seeker of no imperial truth possible or given, explores the richness of contraries and propositions which, each taken to be true, would nullify each other except for their continued presence as a subject of conflict.") Cousin Hannah is the one who climbs mountains, no matter what else she is, and Miss MacIntosh is the one who walks along the beach. Catherine Cartwheel lies in bed. If one of Young's characters meets an obstacle then that obstacle never destroys them or alters them any more than the storm of research destroys the classic novel; the obstacle joins the hurricane and gives the author a new window through which to shine a light at the stable anchor or ground-rooted pole -- on our own sun there are whirlwinds of transparent gas, and if there are no solid objects in the whirlwinds then science can't see them but once a solid is involved then the invisible can be detected -- the same in literature here -- fictional events are solids in the whirlwinds, obstacles are solids, they unveil the contours of winds, they refine the appearances of characters -- the nature of Marguerite Young's book makes these obstacles benevolent -- but Olga Masters doesn't work like that in Amy's Children; her people aren't classical books, and obstacles throw them off course, they swerve, they're impressionable.

Young's characters don't swerve, they plough ahead and trust that their personal gravity will deal with the problem, or not plough exactly because they don't move through life in chronological order, the way Masters' characters do. Young's people don't always know who they are or where they are in time, so say that they hover rather than plough; and when Miss MacIntosh tells the narrator that she's going to establish the primacy of good earthbound common sense she does it by asking questions, almost all of them irrelevant -- "What is a monsoon?" "Where is New South Wales?" "Who was King Canute?" "Where is my brother Richard?" -- which are connected only by the fact that they are factual and that they have factual answers: a monsoon is a real event in the real world and you can in fact describe it -- but this is not sense, suggests Marguerite Young, adding the ridiculous extreme about the brother Richard (a question the narrator won't be able to answer, and I might wonder if all of this woman MacIntosh's questions aren't really some kind of armour or proof of existence or some other thing, each question beginning and ending, each question a short book telling you where the author is positioned), this is not sense, says Marguerite Young, this is a facsimile of sense, and maybe she also says that all common sense is an affectation, it is only apparent not actual, and what else in the world might be apparent and not actual?

Olga Masters' characters have been strapped into time with seatbelts, the chronological car trundles forward and they have to go with it, knocking into problems as they arrive. The car bangs over a bump and their heads shoot up and hit the ceiling. They're bruised but the car keeps going. Young's characters don't bruise anywhere: they easily pick the bump off the road and put it around their necks on a string, saying, Look at my new ornament. Masters' characters suffer the bumps the reader would suffer. I am disguising these people as you, says she. Wallpaper my cracks, says she. Wallpaper their ambiguous parts as you have always wallpapered your own. Or else the reader is not expected to be so interested in other people that they care about cracks. The characters look roughly like people, as the flesh and blood people around us look like people, awkwardly defined and mysterious, and we are in the habit of taking people as they come, in pieces; we do it in real life automatically, so too in books, the habit carries over, the instant leap that occurs when a friend draws three dots and a line on a paper plate and we recognise without hesitating, "That is a face."

Or, another idea, the characters are not there to be understood and mistaken for people but to be absorbed into the brain of the reader, Olga Masters seducing her way in with these imitations so that she can be assimilated, lodging inside like ghost or tapeworm, continuing herself like that, dead Olga Masters, who passed away in 1986. Nine years later died Marguerite Young.

the Life and Times of

("She" in the first paragraph is the American writer Marguerite Young and "the book" is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. See previous posts.)







But the paper cube represents failure, she can't be infinite, she can suggest the idea of infinity, the possibility of endless viewpoints, but there has to be an end, the book has to finish somewhere, either she was going to stop writing voluntarily or death was going to do the job for her; and it stopped her during one of her other books, Harp Song for a Radical: the Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, which was published unfinished in 1999. Promising three volumes she only drafted one. Every author who stops writing a book has acknowledged the presence of death, and the last page of every book murmurs death, death, by implication, making that the final word in every story. The end of every story is, and then they all died.

A character who said a line on page five will never say that line in the same way again no matter how often you read the words, in fact the more you read the more it will mutate, the changes that run through you leaking out and affecting even a static thing like a sentence, or an apparently static thing; the line itself is secretly never still but moves through space and circles the sun. I age, therefore the sentence ages; if it's going to parasitise my memory then it has to take the good with the bad, and let it reflect that we're all in the same boat; this planet earth might feel the same way about me, or a least it acts as though it does.

So I treat the sentence as the planet treats me; this seems unfair and sour but, apparently participating in the nature of a planet as I am, I can't help it, or if it is possible to stop then I don't know how. Hypothesis: nor does the planet.

If she had composed the book orally there would have been nothing to represent her failure except silence. You would drive to the middle of a desert, stop the car, hear no human voice, and it would be the sound of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.

Think of the subtlety she could have had, if novels could be infinite. There would have been billions of variations on Mr Spitzer's character. One viewpoint would only just differ from the one before, in one small part. The next one would differ so, so slightly, in another small way. Instead she made him both alive and dead, which is contradictory enough to get the point across. Infinity had to be replaced with unmistakable strength. Failure, which could be called modification if you prefer, is evidence of her existence as a human being. The novel she had planned was impossible in this natural environment, the one we inhabit, with its trees, flowers, sunshine, bees, water, and the inevitable deaths of its books.

she should have been proud she was ashamed

Marguerite Young's characters are books in an ideal library of classics -- by which I mean? -- that they come in two parts. The first part is a description, something plain and large that sets this person apart from everyone else, it's how you recognise them. Her bus driver is a Republican with a huge beard and there is no one else in the book like him. Cousin Hannah is a suffragist explorer and there is no one else in the book like her. Mr Spitzer and Miss MacIntosh both take walks but Mr Spitzer's walks are city walks and Miss MacIntosh's walks are beach walks. Now you know who they are when they appear, and you could say that these descriptions are like the first impressions that real people have of other real people, they're that red-haired woman who delivers the mail, my rich cousin who bought a yacht, some tag, some placemarker, the person can be summoned up easily, perhaps because you want to extrapolate on them, saying, my rich cousin who bought a yacht, she painted her yacht green last week and sailed to --

The second part is that extrapolation, which, in the fantasy I'm having, is like the commentary that gives the classic (the book itself is the equivalent of the first part) a larger existence in the minds of anyone who considers it, a volume of research or reputation that can, if it's the right size, make the classic so huge that it seems inextinguishable, perpetual, and intimidating as a country. The classic, or first part, stays in place, and commentary takes place around it, in addition to it, which is the way Marguerite Young treats her characters, giving each one that strong nametag of a description and then extrapolating, extrapolating -- they exist to be extrapolated, considered, and seen -- what did Cousin Hannah explore? -- deserts and mountains -- what did she do there? -- in the deserts she rescued women from harems -- and? -- one day the most powerful sheik removed his head-covering and he was a woman -- followed by more details about Cousin Hannah. Was she proud of her adventures? Yes, she was always bold and fearless. No. "For that of which she should have been proud she was ashamed." More information, until the author behaves as if she's reached a point of critical mass and more contradictions appear, the author, that suctioning whirlpool, grabbing and exaggerating those contradictions, announcing that Cousin Hannah may in fact have been the opposite of everything that has been said about her although she did in fact go on those expeditions, but the presentation of her motives may be wrong, in fact is wrong, absolutely wrong, couldn't be more wrong, and here is the right version which I the reader now cannot of course believe is right, but I might not be wise enough to disbelieve it if I hadn't had the other right version first.

Mr Spitzer may be alive or he may be dead, he may be himself or he may be his brother, he may be a gambler with a card up his sleeve or he may not; he is a composer, composing is his passion, but he is not a composer; his music is not the music that you would recognise as the work of a composer.

Here is the person, says Marguerite Young, here is a plump shy lawyer who walks through the city, now look at this part of him, regard if you will, that aspect, I will put this attribute to this name, I will attach it there, saying first that Mr Spitzer takes walks, then enlarging the reader's ideas about his walks, then bringing up a possible alternative, treating these characters like complicated or detailed objects that deserve to be studied and interpreted, and every signal they can give off should be searched for and read, she intimates (by doing it) and yet you'll never find all the signs, you'll always keep adding to this person who seems at first glance, so simple -- this is what she suggests, by giving us one story about the person, then another story, and then when that story is over it segues into another one (has she been reading Ovid?) or she boxes up the sketch of a separate story in a sentence and drops it in there, saying, without saying it, there are parts of them you will never see, not fully, not really, parts that might contradict every idea you've formed about them, new aspects sidle into further aspects, the reader notices a brief mention of a baby, then the baby's father is mentioned, then there's a side-story about him and his personal history, all erupting out of the baby, which erupted out of the mother, which erupted out of the narrator meeting that mother by chance in a rural cafe, which erupted out of a bus trip, which erupted out of the fate of Miss MacIntosh, which came about as the result of a different event or events.

On and on until the characters might begin to appear inexhaustible, as an ideal classic book is expected to seem inexhaustible -- no end in sight to Jane Austen dissertations, says a poster on Wuthering Expectations -- but Austen did not write those dissertations, and Young's characters do not stir up the storm of commentary that surrounds them -- that storm is someone else's work, it is the work of the author, who is trying to represent the rest of the universe. The characters need to appear inexhaustible, because we ourselves, as a human collective, see each object kaleidoscopically (she suggests, and in other places more blatantly stated) -- this is how Cousin Hannah can seem true from two opposite points of view -- it's one of their qualities, this inexhaustibility, these characters, these substitute-people, who are not there as minds-to-be-read, as some fictional characters are, but as things-to-be-looked-at, therefore, the size of the book, one thousand one hundred and ninety-eight pages in my copy from Harvest Books, published in 1979 and bought by me in the secondhand bookshop in Fitzroy that had to move because it had been damaged in the upper floor by fire (this could be another set of extrapolations, this could be in Miss MacIntosh, how the fire began in an air conditioner, how they shifted around the corner to Smith Street, how they had to close again, how I would have gone to their closing-down sale with every book only two dollars if I hadn't been in another country, how that other bookshop on Brunswick Street closed too --) has a purpose -- it takes the idea that each person can be approached from multiple directions ("There is no one way to account for everything") and represents it in time and space: she transforms it into a large paper cube. Maybe a book is also sculpture.

no one way to account for everything

Signs of prosperity change over time: a tallow candle would still have you prosperous today but only because we can see you have money to waste on stumps of efflorescent fat; your eyes love the drips, that black draft is romancing your pocket. Some signs of prosperity do not change; when Olga Masters's Amy can move out of her aunt's spare bedroom she is richer than she was when she couldn't, and that same state of affairs pertains today I swear, even among the Irish flag people and the one dressed as Saint Patrick, although for most of the day I thought he was the Pope. Wuthering Expectations has been thinking about the classics, a canon that has been kneaded to the point where, says a poster at Jillian's Classics Club challenge, the word classic can be applied to Harry Potter if you want, and who am I, asks the poster, to argue otherwise? Who am I? Mr Spitzer in Miss MacIntosh asks the same question and he is actually his brother. "There is no unshakeable law of mental life," wrote Marguerite Young in her profile of Marianne Moore. "There is no one way to account for everything," she says, accounting for Marianne Moore in a single way which is hers.

So the Classics Club challenge is not to read a static thing called classic but to read a book that can be described as a classic in words that convince others and maybe yourself. Your job is persuasion. This is democratic and magical. I argue that Amy's Children is a classic of Australian kitchen sink literature, or books published in the 1980s, or books by journalists born in New South Wales, or books about single mothers in Sydney, whatever suits me; I argue that Harry Potter is a classic of modern children's literature, or books set in boarding schools, or serial fiction, or international entertainment phenomenons, take your pick; I argue that Fumiko Enchi's Masks (thinking of this book because I took it off my shelf last night and it had been rubbed with jam) is a classic among Japanese books with words in their titles that can be translated into English as mask, and so is Yukio Mishima's Confessions of Mask. There may be other classics in that genre.

The libraries of the world are full of classics, anything is a classic, we have enriched ourselves, here is one way in which the changing conditions of our understanding have encouraged the production of certain things and discouraged the production of others, namely, books that could never be called classics of anything, lost books, lost by the lack of imagination in their owners, who can't think of a reason why this book, whatever it is, could be called a classic of something, when, I swear, there is a category small enough to fit anything, a category small as a blue hair ribbon -- look at St Patrick's Day -- a day represented by the colour green -- which allows it to amass any concrete object in the world. No romantic extrapolation is denied. I can walk the streets in a jade cape and people will understand. I can wear a bowler hat with a shamrock in the band. The shamrock can be covered with glitter. It can be six feet tall. The hat can have a drawbridge. I can wear a frog costume and on the stomach of the frog I have sewn the outline of a marijuana plant. Lovely comprehension sweeps through the crowd because it is the seventeenth of March. A category is a thing that can amass. A book is a category: it can amass. Amy's ability to amass is limited; she doesn't have a lot of money and she doesn't show an interest in things that can be amassed without money; she is not like the old woman I noticed in the dumpster behind the block of flats this afternoon holding one arm over her head with the wrist cocked and the hand held flat like the head of a shower. I don't know what she was collecting but it was free. Spring is coming. The largest category on earth is light although blind cave fishes stay evasive; alternatively dark.

to observe her there in her pale green blouse

St Patrick's Day on the Strip: I walked there past the hotels and the rosemary bushes. Half of everybody was wearing green t-shirts and the other half was wearing green hats, an overlap wore both; there were also green shorts, green socks, green bow ties, green straight ties, green wigs, green coats, green headbands with green globes on them or top hats on them or shamrocks on them, everything shone green, everything fluttered green, green face-paint, green necklaces, green tattoos, green capes, a single pair of green soft sequinned gloves waving above a crowd of hats, fur hats with frog eyes, white shirts with green slogans that read Kiss Me I'm Irish, other slogans that read Check Out These Shamrocks (with a shamrock on either side of the chest; no man wore them), green ribbons, green beads, skin-tight bodysuits striped like Irish flags -- and one man dressed in Catholic robes and being Saint Patrick with a mitre on his hair -- the Nine Fine Irishmen pub at the New York New York had a band playing I'll Tell My Ma when I walked past, and the casino had coloured its moat as green as jelly; at night the Venetian and the Palazzo made their white signs ripple green, people were drinking green beer out of foot-long green plastic mugs shaped like simple trumpets, the MacDonalds had a Shamrock Shake, the Rock House was serving five-dollar Car Bombs outside the Imperial Palace or Eye Pea as it's known; the pavement there was so wet that people were skating on it and a man fell over. Outside Margaritaville the tiles were so sticky that my soles wouldn't move without going Platch. Platch plotch I went toward O'Shea's, where they were holding a swansong St Patrick's Day block party before the establishment, with its plaque by the bar remembering a dead patron named Joey Burr "whose favorite Vegas casino was O'Shea's," is shunted away and replaced with a shopping plaza and a ferris wheel. At twelve o'clock the regional manager of Caesars Entertainment played beer pong with a leprechaun.

The Irish pub at Caesars' Palace put corned beef and cabbage on the menu; the British pub at the back of the Crystal modified its patriotic allegiance. A woman came through the crowd holding a swivelling pint in each hand with her elbows out, saying, "I'm sorry, they only had Guinness." Three days later I saw Alexander Waugh, great-grandson of his obvious forebear, and he told us a funny story about a "lunatic" from Ireland who had phoned one morning and invited himself to Alexander Waugh's house because, said the lunatic, my family lived in your house some two or three hundred years ago and I want to look at it. You don't know me but I'll be on the railway platform at half past four wearing a white suit with a small bag in my hand.

Once I was home after the talk I realised that Alexander Waugh's lunatic was Desmond Guinness, son of the brewery. He has written books about old houses and possibly that's how he made his way to the house of Alexander Waugh.

Is there any relationship between St Patrick's day on the Strip and the events in Amy's Children by Olga Masters, an Australian book published in 1987? There is not. There is no relationship. Amy, who lives in the 1920s and '30s, wishes she could afford a blue hair ribbon and finally after some struggle she affords this new hair ribbon, and it meant so much to her when she was first aspiring, that the author bothers to point out that she is wearing it, to let us know that she has climbed and conquered a certain mountain in her life. But the acquired ribbon is mentioned only briefly and perhaps (the reader thinks, or at least I did) it doesn't mean so much to her now, she is moving on, she has moved to Sydney, she has her eyes on larger treasures, for example, a dressing table made of cane.

The human mind absorbs its former self, the old nourishment is not enough, it goes and goes and the acquisition of a hair ribbon or hair band, which was at one time an active living desire that had an area to itself in the conscious thoughts of its host (and it is still there: turn back X pages and read a sentence and there it is, though now the reader's intelligence has moved on into a later phase of Amy's life, and this sentence will perhaps look like a theoretical fact, no longer a felt one, the timeline of the character's life also tied to ours -- I may be wrong here --) is a nod now to an acquaintance the person briefly knew and doesn't regret leaving -- cruel person, thinks Old Amy about New Amy, I don't shrug off my friends like that, and Toddler Amy's craving for whole meals of ice cream goes unfulfilled forever.

A blue hair ribbon would not invigorate the heart of the St Patrick's Day crowd, this thing so tiny, so simple, so cheap, a scrap you could throw away tomorrow and never remember that you had it, lost to you physically and memorably; the ethos of the crowd was waste; the green plastic balls as fat as skulls will be in the bin by next week, the Irish flag suits might have been purchased just for that afternoon because when else would you wear an Irish flag, and they were not meant to be used frequently or every day. Meanwhile the people in Amy's Children need to make the most of everything, they are housed and they have clothes and so they are not totally poor, but the idea of buying a bodysuit just for one event or even a pair of green plastic eyeglasses would be beyond them; it would seem incredible. When we were in a rented small house once, an old house by the sea, we found in the kitchen a 1930s cookbook that told us how to saw a calf's head in half, but today where would I find the head of a calf detached from the calf? They were richer in calf's heads back then. Now we are richer in plastic sunglasses and also Irish flag costumes. Goods come in cycles, one thing is in great supply, another thing is in small supply, then the one thing goes out of fashion and the condition for the other thing become right and it rises, automatically, naturally, goods swim like salmon, goods signal flux, the community breathes in and out, tallow candles are invented in Europe and for once even the middle class can afford light, Rembrandt taking advantage of this, and other painters as well, so we have first tallow candles and then The Night Watch.

Miss MacIntosh in Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, argues against electric light because it encourages people to look at one another at bedtime when decency should be in darkness; and in former ages, she says, men married men and women married women and none of them knew because they couldn't see the other person undress. One of the secrets of Young's style is this: go to the point of reasonable logic and then add the touch that goes past reasonable logic. Never don't go too far. There is no too. She, like the St Patrick's Day crowd, is alien to the spirit of Olga Masters' people, who, in their brink-of-poverty state, worry that even the reasonable limit is too far and a small set of furniture will summon, like a talisman, bankruptcy.

Loss in Olga Masters is ferrety and desperate, loss in Marguerite Young is a grandiose wash and roar but how can this be any other way when her characters raft around on such a massive pad of words? They lose their wigs or their homes and words pour out of the loss, masses of words, it's impossible to be poor in Miss MacIntosh because you're always rich in prose. But Olga Masters is not lush,* she doesn't give her people much to live on, she gives them a poverty of words to eat and they react by feasting on the spectacle of caneware bedroom furniture. The revellers are out on the Strip while these people scrimp. As I was reading Masters it was difficult or impossible not to be aware that other books were proceeding in a more extravagant fashion.







* She's shortwinded, she likes to collapse a physical description of a character into someone else's thoughts about the character, and she often uses the psychologies of the characters to tie them irresistibly to some action that helps her shift the descriptions along, for example, the "compelled," here: "Her uneasy feeling about Amy increased minute by minute, compelled as she was to observe her there in her pale green blouse, cream jumper and navy skirt. She knew the jumper was one from Lincolns and began to think Lance might have allowed her to take it without paying."

She was a journalist for decades before she began to publish fiction. I wonder if she picked up that shortwindedness from her journalism.

like wild pigs against the dark sky

There are books that have been pegged to my memory by a detail, while the rest of the book is a general shape and feeling (a fog of characters, plot, the what-happens, etc) and the one detail stands on its own, not part of this mist impression but another separate summary, one point that contains the book, or is another book, a unit, Elizabeth Hunter in Eye of the Storm opening her eye a little and revealing some world of spirit -- her eye-glint is what I mean by my detail -- and I intuit a book inside or within the detail or behind the detail: inside the detail, ready to unroll, a quiescent spring, the rolled-up tip of a fern, the corgi rolled like a cashew in Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, which they gave us to read in high school, a "high, rat-colored car" in Flannery O'Connor -- in which story? I don't recall, but if you say to me, "Flannery O'Connor" then I see this car standing in a sunlit bare street -- I picture it hunchbacked -- Dorothy Wordsworth noticing in her journal that the swallows outside her window had the tails of fish -- and then on fish, I think of the rotting carp that I saw in a Japanese pool, alive but harrowed with mould, ripe haze in their eye sockets, myself watching them while adults nearby were earthing toy pinwheels over graves. Where was that? Dorothy's brother William consulted her diaries when he wanted to remember a detail for his poems and she wrote about the meeting with the leech-gatherer. If she had chosen other details, would he have written other poems? If Christina Stead hadn't been in love with a man who was Jewish, if she hadn't become interested in Judaism via him, would the stormclouds coming over the mountains in The People With the Dogs have been habited like the rabbi? Her lover appears disguised like a cloud, or mist-hat as the Middle English had it, and the details in those old English poems are guided into life by the sounds they make -- it's poetry, Geoffrey Hill said in his Oxford lectures, forcing us into patterns we might not find if we were not writing poetry; and Greer Gilman, imitating the Middle English alliteration, finds details like that too, for Moonwise. Marguerite Young in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, describes a set of mountains with the word "razorback". I imagine her thinking of the shape of the peaks before she wrote razorback, and it wasn't until she had the word running through her that she remembered -- the word reminded her -- razorback pigs -- because she goes on like this, "snouting like wild pigs against the dark sky."

"His hair had grown three inches since he left Persia at sunset, just when the sun was setting over the empty box factory, over the bare razorback hills snouting like wild pigs against the dark sky, over the trees naked of flowers, the leafless bushes, the foundry that had no bricks and no fires and the bell-tower that had no bells and the flour mill where the flour was black as coal dust," she writes, with one item leading to another, the trees bare of flowers conjuring up the bushes that are bare but can't also be bare of flowers, so it has to be something that sits on a branch like a flower -- leaves, obviously -- and then we already know (I mean, if we're reading the book then we've worked out) that this man has come from a town named Persia so we need buildings as well as plants, and those buildings will be like the plants, in that they're without their natural attributes. So the foundry has no fire, the bell-tower has to have no bells, the flour has to be without the quality that makes it most obvious to the human eye: its whiteness. "Coal dust" because flour too is dust: we've kept the shape and changed the colour. We could have written "the flour mill that has no flour" but this way we stay with the meaning of the passage without being repetitious; we did the same centuries ago when we wrote, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun." Loss is tedious but not literature; let's strike a balance. The more the MacIntosh world loses, the richer we are in words. The blackness of the flour might also be the "dark sky" earlier, and the absence of firelight in the foundry.

Young's language adds and then subtracts, it draws, then erases, then draws again, or draws and erases at the same time, by which I mean that she will name a thing in order to say that it is not in fact there: "No tires, no spare tire, no instruments, no instrument board ... no lights, no rear view mirror, no side mirrors, no tongs, no bellows, no fire, nobody ever pregnant, no star ever born." She writes a word and then overwrites it: "Mr. Spitzer had attended Mr. Spitzer's funeral, and that was why he was so hopelessly benumbed, why he knew so little of all these current events, these current months, these currents in streams, these air currents, this passing or flowing onward." The characters imitate the prose as well as they can within the obvious limitation of being imitation people, the American man from Persia has decided not to cut his hair until the Democratic president is out of office and yet he's never signed up to vote, Miss MacIntosh opposes all British institutions down to the King James Bible but she only wears British shoes, the protagonist's surname is a tumbling action, Cartwheel -- Vera Cartwheel -- veritably she turns around and around, never knowing if she's head or foot -- she grows up next to that shuddering thing called the sea, and her author loves to mention those unstable-looking things, stars, and that middle-colour, purple. Instability! says the book, although it can't say any of it without being stable itself, a block in two volumes.

Charles Dickens prophesised Miss MacIntosh when he renovated a solid object into an abstract. "Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself, or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog’s-eared, independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least regard to anybody." Which has to be one of the strangest descriptions of anything ever written.

for soþe

I was walking back from the mailboxes when I overheard a woman on the other side of a tree say, "You had your hair cut off!" and I knew that she was talking to S., even though I couldn't see either of them, her or S.; and in fact I haven't seen S. for weeks. But M. had spotted him earlier that morning and came to me afterwards saying, "S. has had a haircut, his hair is as short as mine." I didn't see a single physical sign of S., nor did I hear him reply, but if you asked me who was behind that tree with the woman, I would tell you that it was S. Walking up the street I went past a man who had surrounded himself with a fleece of yellow and white string (unwound from ball or cylinder, it was all in curls), and he was holding part of it in one hand and making gestures with the other, cutting the string with a knife, I thought, and not for at least a minute did I ask myself if I had actually seen a knife, to which the answer was no, not a knife, not even the faintest glitter of metal, absolutely nothing that would establish the actual presence of a knife except the tugging action he was making over the string, which seemed to be the kind of tug you would make if you were trying to cut string with a knife.

Deductions! The teenage narrator in Fleur Jaeggi's Sweet Days of Discipline has a friend who looks at her shrivelled chilly palms and says, "You've got an old woman's hands." The narrator tells us then, "I knew that she was attracted to me." She adds: "I can hardly describe how proud I was." Marguerite Young in Miss MacIntosh My Darling creates her characters like this: first she plants them in a location, like a model in a diorama box -- the mother is lying in her bed, and Miss MacIntosh herself, the narrator's nurse, will walk along the beach -- and then she'll extrapolate their characteristics, getting more and more extravagant -- it's as if she's placed a dot on a bare page and then begun to draw circles around it until the page is full. The dot is the core. But the bulk of the book is made of circles. I wonder if it would have been possible to erase the dot and leave the reader to work it out for themselves. What is walking along the beach?

Miss MacIntosh turns out to be less honest than she seemed; she is also the lord's castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is not what it seemed to be either, although, like Miss MacIntosh it both was and wasn't. The two childlike leads in their different books encounter the castle and the woman and they come away perplexed, sorrier, and aware that the world can be more complicated than they'd imagined. Gawain draws back into a mood of adolescent shame. "Now am I fawty and falce and ferde." He groans with misery and anger, the blood runs into his face. "He groned for gref and grame / þe blod in his face con melle." He can't stand this mixed state, he blames other people, he wants to be fixed. What can he do? he asks the Green Knight. Give him a solution! Give him a challenge and he'll beat it! The knight laughs and invites him home to dinner. (Doing it in Middle English which means that he doesn't laugh, he loȝe, and þe ryche fest is in his wonez. Come to my wonez, Gawain, he says but Gawain quod Nay for soþe.)

The castle and Miss MacIntosh deliver invisible wounds, they cut, they're invisible knives -- they gesture, their actions gesture, their falseness is a gesture and a knife, but a necessary knife; the wound is the story; the blood muddles out into the cheeks. Gawain wants to be whole and sole again but everyone else treats him as though nothing serious has happened. His friends at Arthur's court offer to show how much they sympathise by putting on sashes to match his sash -- they'll all be in the same club -- but how is this going to satisfy a man who thinks he's a sinner because he was fooled and scared?

Now he's aware of the goulash-world where quests (which are like games, because they have rules), can be manipulated, and people can't be taken at their word, where there are hints -- and there was a book I read last year that had hints built into the prose itself, written by an author who kept using adjectives like oddly and infinitely so that the world of his language would seem to have more depth than it was possible for him to explain: characters were "oddly close" and "oddly troubled" they felt an "odd comfort" though they were "oddly cold" and caught up in "odd tumult" suffering from "odd vertigo" and hearing an "odd sound" or a "sound of infinite dread," yet they had "infinite patience" and things seemed "infinitely simpler" and "infinitely better" in spite of "an infinite darkness beckoning."

And in defiance of that atmosphere of anti-exactitude they kept trying to pinpoint their emotions and discipline them, "resolv[ing] not to let such feelings frighten" them they "refuse[d] to open [themselves] up to such morbid sensations" and instead they were "Determined to banish these loathsome thoughts from [their minds]" and "suppress the dangerous, undisciplined thought." Breathing a grey smudge of odds and infinitelys they were trying to wrestle control of their own selves from the air and earth of their planet -- that was the story it seemed to me I was reading, though it was not the story the author was trying to tell on the surface of the book; on the surface it was a historical drama with thoughts about the nature of love.

They were holding themselves together or trying to; they wanted to fix themselves in place as Gawain wants to do, stubbornly, against the mass of unspecificness that forces itself in on them -- they want to be themselves, under their own control, defined, exact, revealed, not wafted around with odd feelings, infinite longings -- these blurry hints frightened them, or alarmed them, or made them dig their heels in like children -- and by the end I was backing them against the author, who wanted them to open their hearts lovingly and unrepress, but what did he give them to unrepress into, bar this mush of foggy oddlys? You're a con man sir, they could have said to their creator. I think that bridge you're trying to sell me just doesn't exist.







Fleur Jaeggi's book was translated by Tim Parks. Come to think of it the narrator is not a teenager -- she's telling a story about the time when she was a teenager but she's not one now.

Sir Gawain is available online in several versions. Here it is in Middle English with a modern prose translation.

everything surreal there is to know about life

While I was poking around after articles about Christina Stead I came across a post in which the blogger, Susan Wyndham, told her readers that Melbourne University Publishing means to release "next year … new editions of several novels by Christina Stead." I was electric until I looked at the date on the post. Wyndham was writing in 2006, yet nowhere online can I find mention of those new editions actually being published. One of Wyndham's readers pointed out that Australians can't expect other Australians to know about their literary history if almost everything, except the standard popular books, is out of print. Elsewhere on the internet a blogger who collects Virago editions was being praised by a reader; she had discovered a copy of Stead's The People With the Dogs. This was a rare find, the reader said.

In an Australian Book Review essay, published slightly less than a decade ago, the Melbourne author Laurie Clancy wrote:

It took the heroism of Virago Press to introduce us to previously unknown, 'lesser' novels such as A Little Tea, A Little Chat, and The People with the Dogs and the even greater heroism of [Stead's] friend and executor Ron Geering in making available previously unpublished work such as her novel I'm Dying Laughing and her collected stories and letters but now virtually all her work is again unavailable.

If I had scads of extra money I'd like to reissue all of her novels - a matching set. My own copy of The People with the Dogs is a Virago ex-library hardback, the cover is wrinkly with brittle old library plastic. Thanks to this I think of the story as a somehow fragile thing, an object that crackles. This crackle is inextricable from my idea of Dogs, just as ragged softness is inextricable from my idea of The Man Who Loved Children. My copy of Children is held together with tape and the edges of the paperback cover have frayed into white kinks. The spine of Dogs makes a popping sound when I open it.









Is it really "lesser" Stead? She writes the book in three parts, setting the first part in the city, the second in the country, then the third in the city again, and the country parts feel separate from the city parts in a way that doesn't affect, say, Man, when Sam leaves America. In theory the change works - in theory, you can argue that the contrast between the tight bustle of the city and the relaxation of the country is something Stead needed and wanted. If you were asked to write an essay on the book then this contrast would be very useful. "See," you could say, "how Edward's country upbringing affects the way he behaves in the city. Compare the mass of pet dogs in the country to the pet dog in the city. The countrywoman is free to love her mass of dogs without worrying about the dangers faced by the cityman, whose love kills him when he saves his dog from a tram. Her worries are not the same as his.

'See the same character translated into two different settings. See, Stead is showing us a time of migration, in the US, between country and city. Edward is a desultory socialist. Compare Stead's treatment of him to the harder treatment of the country-born citified communist woman in I'm Dying Laughing, which was so neatly described by Kate Webb in her essay, "The American Dilemma"." And so on.

As a reader, though, as someone making their way through the book from one end to the other, I come away feeling that I've read two novellas instead of a single novel. I feel the break between the two settings far more sharply than I felt the break in Man. Sam, overseas, remained connected to his family at home, with letters, and because the book took us back and forth from one setting to the other, where Dogs draws a sharp line between them. Part One is divided from Part Two with a blank page and a heading: Part Two. Whitehouse. Edward in the city talks about his family, but the ideas that preoccupy him there are divorced from the ideas that collect around the country house where they live. He has to stand alone, a landlord, a businessman. The family home is replaced by the buildings where his tenants live. He doesn't come back to the family for good, as Sam comes home from Asia.

Still, I love Dogs in a way that I don't love some of her more congruous books. Most of her stories are set in cities, but the country gives her a chance to unleash her language across all of nature and the outcome is marvellous, even in the asides.

They went to bed early and slept without waking. All through the night in the sky were reefs of stars and shoals of cloud.

There's that wonderful half-fairytale chanting quality - "reefs of stars and shoals of cloud" - that rounds her realism out with the added bulk of myth, giving it the subtext that real, felt landscapes have, the idea that inside this, if you only knew, there is a story. Randall Jarrell, in his introduction to Man, comments on Henny's witchiness, and her private exchanges with the children are like incantations, both sides charming the other, but the author's main eye is on the mother, the head witch.

Writing "reefs of stars and shoals of cloud" reminds me of the American author Marguerite Young and her Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which is full of stars and clouds and moons, and, also, that incantatory chant, although hers is longer and looser than Stead's. She lacks Stead's cruelty, too, which is the bracing, relishing cruelty of a Roald Dahl. Young tries to hypnotise you, instead, with a repetitive churning rhythm, making a point and then half-repeating it.

…when there was scarcely a memory of her but the snowflake falling through a cloud on a summer's day or perhaps wild diamond horseshoes flashing, glittering on a lonely shore where there were no horses with mother-of-pearl flanks, no bright manes of horses running, and the surf was clouded, the sea burning like a sunken star, almost like a pavement, and the heavens were without a star.

The point of a sentence like that is not to inform you that "the heavens were without a star", but to be a sentence like that. Surely this is why so many reviewers found Miss MacIntosh so irritating. It's not the book to read if you want to know a thing.

One of the other small facts I discovered while I was researching Christina Stead was this: Marguerite Young read her work. When an interviewer asked Young in 1988, seven years before she died, "What other writers do you admire?", she answered,

I loved Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. I love James Merrill’s poems and his short novels. Ambrose Bierce. Vachel Lindsay, I like, and I knew his sister quite well. I love the work of Kay Boyle and Christina Stead. I once spent a wonderful week in New York with Christina, who knew everything surreal there is to know about life.