reloaded at the railway station like tiresome, badly packaged goods

As I did last year, I'll make these posts of paired quotations from books I've read over the past twelve months; and they won't be necessarily the best books, although some of them ... the books that tell narrative stories fairly straightforwardly will be mostly left out, I think, as will the poems needing specific indents and staggers that I don't know how to code.

If – If what, madam? and he snatched my hand, bowed his face upon it, held it there, not looking up to mine. I could then speak – If thus urged, and by SIR CHARLES GRANDISON – I did not speak my heart – I answer – Sir – I CAN – I DO:

I wanted, I thought, just then, to shrink into myself.

(Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, vol. 6, ch XXV)



Yet how grotesque it was that as we made our way to the Gnigl sportsground to compete for our athletic awards we passed hundreds of severely wounded war victims, many of them almost totally crippled, who were being reloaded at the railway station like tiresome, badly packaged goods! Our whole treatment of human beings is grotesque, and nothing is more grotesque than war and all its concomitant circumstances. Even in Salzburg there was an enormous notice over the concourse of the railway station stating that WHEELS MUST TURN FOR VICTORY. One day it fell apart and simply collapsed on the heads of the hundreds of dead underneath.

(Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence: a Memoir, 1985, tr. David McLintock)

he had filled their pages with his archaic handwriting

Hadrian behaves as if you inhabit the same piece of mental earth as the protagonist -- even if you don't, it address you as if you do -- if it treats you like this firmly enough, if it only treats you in this way, if it hammers you with persuasive details, then you will be bent into the right shape -- this is how it seems to think -- if it never lets you have a crack to escape through -- if it never stops squeezing -- if it never shows weakness -- then it will win -- if it does not let you speculate ambiguously -- if it will not let you disagree or laugh -- if it only ever shows approval of its protagonist -- if it only ever seems repulsed by its villains -- "then," it seems to say, "I will triumph."

The protagonist represents this point of view distilled into a person. He is the book itself, he is the book's idea of itself replicated inside itself like a reflection in a mirror, a picture of the author beaming through the medium of prose and shining, smaller, in colour, against a white panel -- he is a proudly stubborn aesthete in a dirty world, retrograde, austere, rebellious, unbending, his taste "exquisite" --

At the upper edge of the board a number of Publishers' Dummies reposed, having the outward similitude of six-shilling novels: but he had filled their pages with his archaic handwriting --

-- two lines later he is quoting Sophocles in Greek, and so the information piles up, the room is graced with "sixteen exquisite Greek intagli" and "a curious Greco-Italian seal shewing St George as a winged-footed Persys," "four tiny ingots of pure copper," and you notice that the scale of the treasures is important here, diminutive items preferred ("tiny ingots"), objects you can only admire if you're being rewarded with a view at close range, "a miniature in a closed morocco case," smallness stressing the character's privacy, poverty, and modesty, "a small low armchair," "a small fire," the items listed and lined up on display by the exactness of a detail that guides the reader's inner eye to one spot, "done on the back of an Admiralty chart," the author never admitting that this heap of little delicates is getting ridiculously large; you either respect it or you're out.

"Cultivate the art of saying No," says the protagonist to himself because he is afraid he is too nice. The book erects boundaries as it goes, such is its temperament, it creates and discovers them; if it hates then it wants you to hate, if it loves then it wants you to love. If you are not its kind of person then it does not want you. "It does not want me," I thought. Rolfe does not try to persuade, he tries to obliterate, banish, or crush.

"He behaves as though I am somehow him," I thought, "and as though I am reading this book through his own brain, so that all he has to do is use a word like "low" or "conventional" or "socialist" and his disgust will be transferred instantly into my veins, he treats his words as if they are hypodermic needles."

Here was the spoor of a time that had departed. I was supposed to know. It was supposed to be in the air. I was supposed to be viscerally revolted by pre-Revolutionary Russian Communism. The book was published in 1903. I feel a wall. The book is on the other side. There was no wall, now there is a wall. It wants ascetic coolness and visceral hating emotion together. A character speaks with a slang accent. I am supposed to think that he is morally squalid not only because he has those thoughts but because he expresses them in that voice. The voice is coarse and coarseness is vile. Rolfe is so repelled he's spitting. Through no other route may I emphathise with this book. But I am so distant from that time and place that I couldn't sacrifice myself like that even if I wanted to. I am blocked even from the pyre. The author is suffused with disdain. I believe that I can read his mind that far. I can describe the shape of his hatred by borrowing the words that he uses. He hates people who bark, he hates people who drop an h, he hates people who don't respect the monarchy. But my description is pure word-borrowing. I am only making a quick skin for that hatred so that I can tell you, "He hates."

Thomas Bernhard's books call people pigs and philistines but they're not as smug as Hadrian -- they're not martyred saints -- they don't insist so coldly and soothingly on their own holy infallibility -- and I get along with them better -- their protagonists who'd like to scratch off their own faces -- Rolfe likes his own face intact and noble -- the more petty he is, with his hatred of accents or ugliness, the more he wants his nobility -- I have learnt something here, I thought --

myself stuck between its hinges

So there were these quotes going to and fro between several books, the evangelical with a book in his suitcase, Heat-Moon with a book in the back of the van, both of them with the books in their heads, Murnane with a book somewhere in his house probably or the quote written in a notebook he might keep close by, Orthofer somehow able to identify the same quote possibly because he owns the book from which Murnane borrowed it, and then I read Thomas Bernhard's Frost translated by Michael Hoffmann, and in Frost the lead character goes on a journey with a book, not one that he knows but one that he does not know, one that he has not read yet, a novel by Henry James which he thinks will give him something to do during the trip at those times when he is not talking to the person he is going away to meet.

He doesn't give away the title of his James but he does describe one memory of the plot as far as he has understood it. "I read my Henry James without understanding what I've read: I seem to remember women following a coffin at a funeral, a railway train, a destroyed town, somewhere in England."

A Frost reviewer at the New York Times decided that he must have been reading The Ambassadors, because "as in “Frost,” one character’s task is to go on a journey and bring back confidential tidings of a loved one in trouble" and "In both novels, the traveler is transformed" yet the narrator's description does not match anything in The Ambassadors, nor does it even sound like a bad memory of The Ambassadors, which for a start does not take place somewhere in England.

The narrator quotes this sentence from his James, "The earth might be clear, I feel myself stuck between its hinges without regard to myself, you understand" -- a sentence that does not appear anywhere in The Ambassadors, nor does it seem to appear anywhere in the work of Henry James, as far as I can tell. I might be wrong, it might exist somewhere, the "destroyed town" might be the burning house in The Spoils of Poynton, it might be one of the Jameses I haven't read (The Awkward Age and Roderick Hudson), the narrator might be reading a German James and Michael Hoffmann might have translated the sentence from German back into English and come up with an arrangement that is nonJamesian, but I am ready to be told that this is not in fact a James, and that Thomas Bernhard invented it with some idea that people reading his book in the future would assume that this James was real and that its identity was a riddle they'd be able to figure out if they followed the clues (but if this is not a James then they are inventing the clues, as clues; there are no clues); and they will pursue the riddle, since literature students are taught to follow clues. What symbolism is this? they ask. What does the tower represent? Why is that flower a rose?

What if this James in Frost is a clue that does not lead to a book but is an arrow pointing to the reader and saying, You thought this was a book, didn't you? You thought I was William Least Heat-Moon, having a person read an actual book you could pull off your shelves and open to page eighty-five.

The left brain is the part that will connect one thing to another (so I read), it is the hemisphere of invention, it is given the words "Henry James" and connects them to its experiences of the sensuous world and if you are a reviewer for the New York Times then it will encourage you to say that The Ambassadors must be the work the narrator is reading because you can find a similarity there, you notice that a man is travelling to meet another man, and you are disregarding almost all other elements of the book but that, so that one book will lead to another, and the continuation of life and habit will not be derailed, all this knitting over absences.

he remembered now to have heard afterwards

My abstinence continues; last week I finished only books by Henry James.

At the moment I am dealing with one of his shorts, The Siege of London, and he is being dry about Nancy Headway. "He remembered now to have heard afterwards that she was getting a divorce. She got divorces very easily, she was so taking in court … She had gone in mainly for editors -- she esteemed the journalistic profession." The setting is a theatre foyer, and one man has asked another for news of the "indescribable" woman he saw in the audience during the first half of the play. That woman is Nancy. The second man begins to give information hesitantly, thoughtfully, not telling the eager first man everything he knows, and so, like this, James is inviting the reader (ignorant, like the first man, and therefore in his position if in anyone's) to become a gossip, a person who wants scandals and specifics (gossip thrives on context and detail) and then he rewards them with vagueness, evasive and with that glittering Jamesian priss, dodging, always dodging. James' dryness is never really dry. It sparkles too much. There is no life in his books, said Borges, but it's not true, there is life, of a crystalline kind, peeping out constantly from under the rocks it sets there for itself to crawl under -- the books moving so quickly between constant repression and constant violation of that repression that the prose sends up a camouflage shimmer.

James is teasing about his character's divorces, and for his time and for his adopted society* it is possible that he was being perversely cheerful, and almost French, but I don't know for sure, I am ignorant, and everywhere I turn my ignorance irritates me, in all directions and on the topic of everything, although I have opinions (and when did ignorance ever stop anyone having an opinion) about the Renaissance Faire we went to last weekend -- my first -- and all of the entertainers, aside from the Bird Man, who juggled flaming torches on top of a giant rubber ball, were telling fuck jokes, which disheartened me.

Their technique was sometimes direct and sometimes innuendo, and, in the case of Zilch the Torysteller, Spoonerisms. The husband in his Rapunzel didn't pick the witch's plants, he licked her pants. Away, around, on a different stage, a ventriloquist's doll in a plumed aristocratic hat pointed to a man standing near a woman and told everyone that the man had a stack of quarters in the crotch of his trousers, then, later, a pirate pretended that he was pressing his face between a pair of invisible breasts and went wbb wbb wbb. Was it only the proximity of Gargoyles that made me think of Bernhard? The Elizabethan dresses in the shops were pricey, good garb isn't cheap, and the entertainers had spent years on their acts (eleven years, said one of the Sisters in Hey Nunnie Nunnie, they'd been performing at this particular Faire for eleven years), and various audience members were dressed in velvet and capes, artful peasant tunics, there was a monk, a number of brigands, some Lord of the Rings-looking individuals, swords, helms, beautiful masks, and so on -- so here we were in our satins and silks and other extravagances to listen to people talk about cock.

And a generalised mist of Bernhard went through my head: those characters of his reading books, becoming cultured, raising children, and all of it being useless, empty, hollow, and ending in nothing but madness, illness, and death, which are at the bottom of all things in the Bernhard universe. And here was the Renaissance Faire like a crude and lumpy version of that, saying, you can wear all the courtier velvet you like, and carry a knightish shield, but in the end you'll be sitting in front of something like a live version of Funniest Home Videos as surely as if you'd stayed at home in your undies. All your long struggle in search of a specialness for yourself, and a unique style of dress, will be undone by a landscape of lumpen punchlines and nudity, which is your fate.

You've come looking for fun, said the Renaissance Faire, and here is the fun you can have, this is what is provided, in a single flavour -- but then there was our single outlier, the Bird Man, who squawked rather than spoke, covered his face and body in tatty Skeksis leather, seemed sinister, and preserved a kind of mystery, a visitor from another world, at a festival where the rest of the entertainment was dedicated to simplicity and the erasure of mystery: an erection is a single thing, a joke, and a pair of breasts is a single thing too, it is a joke, and all of this is easy to understand, this parade of single things, which anyone can grasp and then dismiss, and go on to the next joke, which will be one of the Tortuga Twins promising to show you his own intimate parts, and the other Twins recoiling with imitations of horror, because it would not be funny if we were not disgusted by it, or at least capable of pretending that we were.

The identification of a literary precedent made me, not happier exactly, but more content with it, as if we had reached a settled place, and the tension between the two states had been not abolished but resolved -- through a team effort, myself and the book, both interior, working together silently -- or me working on it -- in the darkness, invisible -- and vague feelings toward Proust too, and ideas about art informing life, or framing it, and providing a kind of rejuvenating connective tissue -- which was perhaps the nature of the joke as well, the single joke, for someone else: a connective tissue, and, look, here is the joke again, and told again, and so life appears to make sense, a continuity, a symmetrical beauty, a measure, a comfort.







* The Siege of London was published in 1883 and James was in England.

"Indescribable" comes in this passage:

Waterville was still in the stage of surprise; he suddenly expressed the emotion. "By Jove!" exclaimed; "I beg your pardon -- I beg her pardon -- there is, after all, a woman that may be called" -- he paused a little, inspecting her -- "a kind of beauty!"

"What kind?" Littlemore asked vaguely.

"An unusual kind -- an indescribable kind."

At this point the two men are still inside the auditorium, and Waterville, an American new to Paris, is scanning the audience with "a dainty but remarkably powerful glass." Littlemore, to whom Paris is a familiar city, is unexcited, but Waterville is still willing to be astonished by whatever the city can give him. This is why he is "still in the stage of surprise." He scans -- and you can compare this scanning to the action of the reader, who is searching through this mat of prose for an interesting moment, the point at which the story will catch the attention -- he scans, and then Nancy appears, and focusses all of his astonishment (and for the reader too. What gossip doesn't want to hear more about an indescribable person, so arresting that she stands out in a crowded audience? Beauty is one thing, but beauty that cannot be described is more than Beauty, it is Mystery.)

"A dainty but remarkably powerful glass" is typical James, circuitous, noting a quality and then noting a quality buried beneath the first quality, the second quality unguessable without closer acquaintance -- any onlooker can see that the glass is dainty, but no one who has not handled it would know that it is powerful -- also the judgment and remote arch tone of "remarkably," all culminating in the impression that the last thing this author would ever do is describe an object with its brand name -- as Stephen King does, for instance, being a writer who will root, say, a packet of cigarettes, in a certain time and place, and offer you the class status of the character carrying the packet, by telling you the brand. James is an unrooter. (In The Ambassadors he becomes so superbly fastidious that he won't even tell you what a specific object is, only that it is small and vulgar.)

dark lanterns swinging from the trees, and these lanterns are the light

I haven't read many books lately. Instead I've been trying to finish a long manuscript, and so I say to myself, "You will not read a book that someone else has written, you will read your own manuscript instead, and you will take note of the places where you have left out a space between the words, and those places where things do not make sense. You will not distract yourself with Margaret Laurence, or with Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, or with Methods and Materials of Painting Vols. One and Two by Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, One Time President of the Royal Academy, who believes that the silence of Pliny on the subject of pictures, when speaking of resins and drying oils, is not conclusive against the antiquity of oil varnish, quote, unquote, and who dedicates this observation among others to The Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart." In this mood I have read Rose Macaulay's Towers of Trebizond, and Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles translated by Richard and Clara Winston, and only four or five other authors, so the vow of abstinance has had an effect.

Reading Gargoyles I began to think about monomania, as a literary virtue, a virtue you can see in Proust, and in Samuel Beckett, this obsessive hammering and tunnelling, as if the author can't quite believe that things really are like this, and so they look again, and again, and every time it is the same, and they are not startled exactly, but the recurrance on its own is surprising, like that scene at the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the two actors flipping coins, and the coins always coming up heads. Bernhard's coin always comes up heads, and Heads is Misery. His narrator's father is "the only doctor within a large and "difficult" district" whose other doctor has fled to Graz "where he had accepted a teaching post at the university."

"The chance of a replacement," said my father, "is practically nil. A man would be mad to want to start a practice here." For his own part, he said, he was used to sacrificing himself to a sick populace given to violence as well as insanity.

This Austrian doctor takes his narrator-son with him on his rounds and they meet various patients, a bartender who has been knocked unconscious by a drunk, a musical lunatic. The father reflects on the bitter fate of the local schoolteachers. "Most of them lapsed fairly soon into an apathy that might at any moment turn to madness." A boy has fallen into a vat of boiling water, a woman is dying, her only living relative is a depressed thug, the millers' sons and a mute Turk are strangling parrots, and the prince on the battlements is mad.

The violence and insanity are so pervasive that it seems that if the other doctor has freed himself then he must have shifted not to Graz but to an alternative universe, or else Mars. The narrator's father is like a small god, moving from one soul to another and listening to their problems. And they wait for him; he is the only one who moves, the only connection, the only one who is truly mobile, but he is helpless too, his daughter is sinking into misery, and his patients perish.

No touch of exoticism (the Turk, the prince) can stave off despair; the Turk is an economic migrant, scared and sad, and the prince's son prefers London to Austria. "We are without parents," says the prince. "We are orphans." He gives a speech, starting with the characters of some people he met that morning, and then going on for a hundred pages, spinning farther and farther out, "all education is always utterly wrong," his son will betray him and destroy his home and the farms he has developed, the crops, the food, his life's only useful work will be ruined, he cannot talk, he cannot explain himself, books are no help -- he goes to read one to his sisters and instead reads the newspaper. Bernhard the writer mocks reading. Authority is fickle, culture is ash, ideas about freedom are nonsense. "If I am alone I feel like being with people; and if I am with people then I feel like being alone."

He is convinced that his son despises him and is dangerous, still the prince thinks about the young man and longs for him, wishing they could find some common ground. "The one and only thing we have in common is our fondness for the newspapers." In the last line of the book he asks the doctor to buy him a newspaper, which means that he is still hoping; even after the long speech, he still hopes; it is idiotic, but (Bernhard tells us, and as the author of a book he should know) it is human nature to go forward in this ridiculous state. Life makes us clownish (as if we ever had any hope of not being clownish -- but then again we do have that hope of not being clownish; and this is one of the clownish things about us) and we end up dead.

Even the doctor, experienced as he is, educated as he is, hearing this despair all day, persists ridiculously, believing in the importance of his son's education. "He's making wonderful progress -- he's better than all the others," he exclaims, which, in the context of this ghastly wasteland, sounds feeble, frail, deluded -- connections to other people in this book are vehicles for hope, and hope is ridiculous -- and then he immerses the youth in the spectacle of these sick patients as though he's trying to create an original Buddha, the rebel who needs to find himself a spirit-life before he can discover purity, as it is not available on earth, Bernhard recovering the distress of the young Gautama.

Macaulay's narrator despairs as well, but her despair has a more specific focus: she is High Church Anglican by nature, but she has somehow become agnostic.

But most of us know that nothing can be as true as all that, and that no faith can be delivered once for all without change, for new things are being discovered all the time, and old things dropped, like the whole Bible being true, and we have to grope our way through a mist that keeps being lit by shafts of light, so that exploration tends to be patchy, and we can never sit back and say, we have the Truth, this is it, for discovering the truth, if it is ever discovered, means a long journey through a difficult jungle, with clearings every now and then, and paths that have to be hacked out as one walks, and dark lanterns swinging from the trees, and these lanterns are the light that has lighted every man, which can only come through the dark lanterns of our minds.

Macaulay specialises in a British form of comedy, the sane muddle. Both books are very funny.