in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt

There's no public transport out here in the Arizona countryside, but every now and then I manage to hitch a ride with someone going near a secondhand bookshop. This state has an abundance of Melville, plenty of Twain, multiple copies (at the Mesa Bookmans store) of Zora Neale Hursten's Harlem Renaissance novel, And Their Eyes Were Watching God (all similar too; a nearby school must have it on a reading list), and a good amount of Henry James. I've picked up two-dollar copies of the Sacred Fount and the Ambassadors.

By the third chapter, Ambassadors has already delivered an apogee of fastidious Jamesian sentence-making, a sentence that seems to be trying to, on one hand, look prim, armoured, and fastened in place, and, on the other hand, writhe away off the page or dissolve into mist. It says everything very properly and at the same time you get the feeling that it would prefer not to say anything at all, or somehow avoid having a meaning -- because it takes so long to reach a conclusion, and then, when it arrives, it pulls back. 'Agreeable' becomes a loaded word because it seems to be avoiding something, more vehement perhaps -- or perhaps the character doesn't know, exactly, the word that would describe his feelings just there, so he picks 'agreeable' because it seems to work well enough; he might find out more about those feelings later maybe, after he has spent some time working out whether prepared is the word he needs to use, or if already confirmed would be the right phrase -- in this way he fusses around to distract himself, as if he's trying to get out of the responsibility of finishing his thought.

The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it -- or unless Weymarsh himself should -- it would constitute a menace to his own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable.

The nature of the menace is vague. James' menaces are typically vague and potentially endless. (Speaking of: I was lying awake at three a.m. a few nights ago when the Turn of the Screw came into my head, that face pressed against the window, "the hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation" and that was that for at least half an hour of imagined floating Quints.) Meanwhile the Sacred Fount is the story of a man who decides that he is better than anyone else at detecting secret vampires and spends the rest of the book watching peoples' eyeballs twitch.

There's something of Jane Austen's exactness in James -- the weight he puts on agreeable is the weight that she can set on top of a little word like nice. Those words become mostly punchline or post-preface, like icebergs hiding their keels. "There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis," wrote Walter Benjamin, and James, decompacting, diffusing himself across the ether (or, as this is his universe, creating the ether across which he diffuses himself, so that the medium and the matter floating through it are one and the same, the verb and the noun simultaneous, united, indivisible), is elaborately so chaste that his virginity curdles. Psychological analysis might, at any moment during one of his books, begin, but never does. The story is always taking place away to the side somewhere.

(In the Wings of the Dove a woman's doctor tells her that she is deathly, incurably ill, but this takes place on some plane of existance outside the actual book -- we, the readers, only witness a conversation about the weather. This conversation about the weather is the same as the conversation that tells the woman she is going to die; that is, she understands, from this conversation about the weather, that she is going to die, but the information about her deathly illness was conveyed at a pitch too high for the readers' ears, as if spoken in the language of bats or angels. The woman understood it, and her weird saintliness is confirmed).

I've seen a few Australian authors for sale here, and the sight of those names on the spines surprises me every time, except in the case of Peter Carey and Stead's Man Who Loved Children. Both have been spruiked in the US pretty well, so no need for astonishment. Bookmans had all three of Eliot Pearlmans' books, as well as Les Murray's Subhuman Redneck Poems (and a book in the travel section called Around Australia in 22 Days or similar). In a tiny one-room bookshop at the end of a right-angled arcade in Prescott, north of Phoenix, I found anthologised Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Carey turned up in both places, and also in a cellar of books underneath a charity shop across the street from the Coolidge post office. You know where this place is because there is an A-frame board on the pavement outside with Cellar of Books written across it next to an arrow. Everything in the town around it looks defunct, but, behold, below, there is a man with a beard and his Cellar of Books, concrete-walled and cold after the warmth outside.

insistent yet curiously uneasy

So City Basement Books has closed. They had a row of Anita Brookners and I bought one of each title. There is a particular atmosphere that comes out of her books, smothering, bleak, enervating and honest -- relentlessly, calmly honest; each book is a single large unforgiving muscle of honesty that closes around you like an anaconda -- as if you're being drained by a vampire, a quiet and unobtrusive vampire that latches softly onto the back of your neck and gives you no trouble while it sucks; in fact it does not like you but its manners are very nice, and when it draws its head away and addresses you by name you notice that it has the French literary habit of speaking in aphorisms, near-aphorisms, and bits of jaded, graceful neatness.

Ruth avoided sentiment, for she had seen how easy it was to come by.

or

She did not realize that most men accept invitations to dinner simply in order to know where the next meal is coming from.

One of the books I bought was her first, A Start in Life. It seems typical of her contrariness that she would begin a fiction-writing career by telling you that you can be cursed by reading.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

And the character's life goes on to be so bleak and modest that although the first line might not be strictly true -- it wasn't only literature, but literature didn't help; there was also a terrible, passive trust -- you can't shake it off as a joke. She writes numerous funny lines but they are grim, not jokes. None of her funny lines are jokes.

She does not hobnob with the reader, does not condescend, does not write in an easy startling way, and if she writes about a woman, as she often does, and as she does in Life, then the woman will be quiet, humble, good, and plain. She will not be a role model, not a bold person, not a success. She will be unloved, wretched, miserable, self-contained. She will be brave, but her bravery will be neither recognised nor rewarded. She will not remove her glasses, untie her plait, and come to a happy ending. Quietness and modesty will be her undoing, they will leave her stranded. Confident, happy, brash people will take advantage of her. She will acknowledge that this is her own fault.

For moral fortitude, as Dr Weiss knew, but never told her students, was quite irrelevant in the conduct of one's life; it was better, or in any event, easier, to be engaging.

Nearly thirty years after Life was published in 1981 an interviewer would ask Brookner about Plato, and her answer would be the opinion of Dr Weiss.

Didn't Plato say the unexamined life is not worth living?

She gives the faintest smile. 'Plato could be wrong too. I think the unexamined life is much better. Much more comfortable.'

So you wish you had been…

'Blithe…' It rolls off her tongue, wrapped in longing. A lovely word, I say.

'It's an old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much.'

So you envy the blithe?

'Oh yes.'

The journalist might have felt prompted by this, from 1986's A Misalliance

Bathed and dressed, Blanche took down from her shelves the Philebus of Plato and read that the life of pleasure must be mixed with reason and that the life of reason must be mixed with pleasure but that a third quality, to which both reason and pleasure look forward, must be the final ingredient of a good life. Realizing, with a slightly sinking heart, that given the choice she might have settled for a life of pleasure, she laid the book aside.

With Life the note is struck, the string is plucked, the reverberations will go on for decades, in book after book. A Start in Life is all plucked strings. Ah! you say when Anthea shows up. I recognise her! That's the Attractive and Confident Friend! The Ruthless Modern who buys the shop in Undue Influence appears for the first time, in embryo, under the name of Roddy. And oh, it's the Cruelly Truncated Escape to Paris that damages the young lead character of Leaving Home! The shrouded, stifling home life! The woman looking after her parents! And the timid female habit of giving the floor over to a forceful young man!

Richard draped the cat round his shoulders. Ruth and Miss Howe watched in fascination as he unleashed the full glory of his smile.

"He'll be all right, won't you old chap?" he said, bringing Tiger down like a scarf until he could rub his cheek on the cat's neck. Tiger was his slave. Miss Howe waited patiently until he rewarded her with a friendly pat on the shoulder.

This is humiliating to read -- this old woman waiting for a caress from a young man simply because he is handsome -- and it will be even more painful in later books when the young man is a careless nephew whose elderly relative is greedy for him and accepts his condescension as the price of his visits. Here in Life is the Brookner tone, fully formed already, immaculate, here is the Brookner language, her quality of being unowned, remote as a cat; here is her cool Proustian way of evaluating friendships.

Her insistent yet curiously uneasy physical presence inspired conflicting feelings in Ruth, who was not used to the idea that friends do not always please.

French writers play a role in this book but Proust is not mentioned. Ruth Weiss studies Balzac. Her life is stymied, worn down, sacrificed. Later the author will suggest that persisting with this kind of modest half-erased existence is a kind of unrecognized nobility. Your personality has betrayed you yet you are true to it, your interior knight bending the knee to your interior belle dame sans mercie.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

All of the Brookner novels I've read could be prefaced with this Keats, and it would seem apt. Not always perfect, but apt.

half-blind, twin-boxed

Wondering if there is someone reading this tonight who is in or near Melbourne, I'll say again that City Basement Books is closing at the end of the month, in other words: tomorrow, at six o'clock. Is it six? I believe it's six. They've priced the remains of their stock down to a dollar a book. I bought a bag of them today and my right arm is aching. Now every time I look around the room I see a title that I never expected to see outside that shop, and I feel a fresh surprise. Benito Pérez Galdós' Doña Perfecta has startled me at least three times now. Am I the first person to have bought Henry Treece's book about Dylan Thomas because it had Treece's name on the front and not Thomas'? "That stinking book," Thomas called it after it was published. Victor Paananen believes that the poet was offended because Treece dismissed his socialist credentials.

Professor William York Tindall of Columbia University, offered an important report that has been ignored by Thomas’s biographers. "Thomas told me (in 1952) that he was a Communist. My disbelief was shaken, however, at a party a few days later. Here Thomas suddenly arose, kicked the cat which turned and bit me and, to the embarrassment of our hostess, called a distinguished and once radical American novelist, who was also a guest, both ‘renegade’ and ‘prick’."

"One must regret," continues Paananen, "the unfortunate outcome that Thomas’s explosion had for the cat, but the incident does point to convictions passionately held by Thomas. No doubt Thomas had, as so often, been drinking, but in vino veritas."

Skimming through Treece's book I've come up with another theory: Thomas might not have been utterly flattered when his friend (they were friends) told the world that he was a "scallywag" with "the glutinous smile of a young boy."

We let society hamstring us in a hundred ways ... But Dylan just remained himself, his honest scallywag self, and was inevitably destroyed, like all other perpetual boys -- the beachcombers, the divers for pennies, the lion tamers, the test pilots, the climbers of mountains ...

The tone here is similar to Mervyn Peake's somewhere in the Gormenghast books. Where have I seen him making a list like this? I'll try to remember to look it up later. Thomas knew Peake, too. One day the poet turned up at the door, ill, and Peake put him to bed and called a doctor. Later Thomas borrowed his clothes.

Not long after [writes Mervyn's wife Maeve] a note was pushed through the door.

Mervyn, dear Maeve

Will you please lend me coat and trousers for a day. Any coat and trousers as long as they aren't my own. I am supposed to speak at a public platform tomorrow, Sunday, just after lunch. May I call early morning --

Love, Dylan.

On the other side, with a scribbled drawing:

I must unfortunately call for coat and trousers -- doesn't matter that M is taller than D before 11. Say 10.30.

My copy of Dylan Thomas is a green hardback, the same shade of green as the Bodley Head book of essays covering Treece, Beatrix Potter, and C.S. Lewis. But the publisher is different and the book a little shorter. At the back there are lists of the compound words Thomas used in his poems. They've been arranged under headings, so you have

Number Compounds
two-gunned, four-stringed, twelve-winded, one-sided, half-blind, twin-boxed, three-coloured …

for example, and

Eye- Compounds
Mothers-eyed, tallow-eyed, red-eyed, scythe-eyed, womb-eyed, salt-eyed, bull's-eye, eye-teeth, penny-eyed …

and so on. The last group of words is the largest one.

Other Compounds
clayfellow, winding-sheets, year-hedged, hang-nail, Christward, planet-ducted, skull-foot, goblin-sucker, marrow-ladle, breast-deep, bread-sided, close-up, arc-lamped, sheath-decked, black-tongued, deadweed, bible-leaved, wind-turned, bell-voiced …

So it runs on down the page. Treece has compiled another list too, one that puts Thomas' compound words next to compound words used by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Class: Alliterative
Hopkins: May-mess
Thomas: sky-scraping, fair-formed

Class: Triple-compounds
Hopkins: day-labouring-out
Thomas: hero-in-tomorrow

Coincidentally, one of today's other books was a compendium of Gerard Manly Hopkins.

1866

For Lent. No puddings on Sundays. No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion week or on Fridays. Not to sit in armchair except can work in no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.

He would have been twenty-two.

an intellectual model where Right and Truth conquered all

"Is it going to be easy to find books about Christina Stead secondhand in North America," I wondered to myself, and, "No," I said back, looking at myself fairly, "probably not," (because I tempt myself with dread, sometimes, and the prospective ends of things, probably unnecessarily, or possibly not, incorporating them into whatever thoughts I'm having, which seems, perhaps, damaging, or something else), so when I saw that City Basement Books was holding a half-price sale in order to shed as much stock as possible before the landlord ousted them, desiring (as he apparently does) to do something with the building that doesn't admit a secondhand bookshop in the basement, I flew there (wings on ankles) and bought two books I knew they had on their shelves, Christina Stead: a Life of Letters, by Chris Williams, and The Enigmatic Christina Stead: a Provocative Re-Reading, by Teresa Petersen. There were a few other books too, but I mentioned my last Stead book so I thought I'd mention these two as well, for the love of continuity.

Williams' biography came out in 1989, four years before Hazel Rowley's Christina Stead: A Biography. In 1988 the Age mentioned both authors in an article called "The Race To Tell Christina Stead's Story." There was a third prospective biographer too, Kate Llewellyn, whose book was never published. The University of NSW is still storing her notes, as you can see at their website:

Guide to the Papers of Kate Llewellyn
…

9.3, Christina Stead, 1979-1993

This subseries comprises notes, manuscript and typescript drafts, contract and cuttings relating to critical biographies on Christina Stead written by Llewellyn. Llewellyn was commissioned by Thomas Nelson Australia to write a biography of Stead, which was never published.

Folder 1
Annotated typescript drafts and newspaper cutting of a biographical criticism by Llewellyn entitled 'The woman who loved men', 1993

Folder 2-4
Material regarding 'Christina Stead : a biography', by Kate Llewellyn, 1988-1989

Including contract, correspondence, cuttings, interview notes and articles regarding Stead

"Her three biographers," remarks the article in the Age, "are all very different people, who are expected to produce very different books. Williams is doing "the life"; Melbourne academic Rowley is doing a more critical study of "the work"; while Sydney poet and author Kate Llewellyn appears to be doing a more imaginative study of both life and work." Llewellyn, it says, "has a close association with a member of the family," a line that illuminates this entry on her archive page:

Folder 44
Correspondence from Robert Stead, 1986-1990

My first impression of the Williams book is that this is a more businesslike biography than the later one, less speculative, more shortwinded, fixing itself around statements that can be verified by documents -- it's something like a long, coolheaded article from a magazine. Williams takes quotes from Stead at face value; her language is plain.

David Stead wanted the world to conform to an intellectual model where Right and Truth conquered all. So unbending was David, he was prepared to suffer financially and emotionally rather than yield to the realities of a morally imperfect world.

David Stead told his daughter Christina a lot about himself …

An outline of Williams' credentials on the first page of the book tells us that she trained "as a journalist with ABC News," and went on to work in other television and radio positions afterwards; and it's not hard to imagine this clear, simple, almost-uninflected prose being read aloud while the viewer watches pictures of Stead and her father and her various homes, her husband, her books, etc, rise up on the screen. Here is a reproduction of a page of notes for The Man Who Loved Children; here is part of an illustrated letter she sent to her cousin Gwen; here is the transcript of a passage from a radio interview she gave in 1980. The voice-over is not often excited or unexcited, it's there at your service, it's here to help, to introduce Stead to you as neatly and fully as possible, without too many opinions of its own -- which makes this Christina Stead the farthest thing in the world from a biography like Graham Robb's Victor Hugo, throughout which the author goes into periodic spasms of rage at Hugo's other biographers, and scolds them, and shakes his fist. (Reviewing a volume about Proust for the New York Review of Books, he took time out to name the original English title of Proust's work "weak" and "passive"; this is his opinionated style, and it's stimulating.) Williams comes closest to shaking a fist when she's reporting on the anti-Communist investigation of Stead and Blake during the 1950s, but even there she displaces the opinion onto an outside body. "History," she writes, not I.

History will undoubtedly take the view that the investigation was an expensive international exercise in covert harassment and indirect but effective censorship.

Petersen's book is the opposite, all theory, all opinion, I suggest and I contend. She believes that Stead was a repressed lesbian. This theory is supported by a "close reading" -- she repeats the phrase "close reading" in every chapter, I think, contrasting it with "naive reading" until it ends up seeming boastful; and she falls in love with other phrases as well: "homosexual signifier" and "heteronormative paradigm," and so on. Eventually she comes up with "rhizomatic writing" and adds that to the pile. Repetitive jargon is one of her problems,* and the other is this: you can see her picking her way through Stead's work and life and throwing aside anything that doesn't agree with her predetermined ideas. The People with the Dogs is dismissed almost entirely, because, she says, it is "a fairytale", yet the ghost story from The Puzzleheaded Girl is magically admissible, and so is Beauties and Furies' Marpurgo, whose "grotesque appearance is congruent with the gothic genre" -- he is an outsize fairytale figure, a mean genie. So let me perform a "close reading" Petersen-style upon Petersen's protestation. I contend that her excuse is flimsy, fluffy, false. I suggest that the fairytale aspect of Dogs doesn't bother her a scrap. If it did, she would ignore Marpurgo and the ghost story for the same reason. In fact she wouldn't be reading Stead at all. Stead is steeped in folk tales and Arabian Nights. No. She wants to rid herself of Dogs because Dogs, if she took it seriously, would damage her theory. Dogs ends with a happy wedding, and elsewhere she argues that all male-female pairings in Stead's work are calamitous. Dogs is her Other, and she Others it out of her way so that she can get on with the more important job of assuming that parts of For Love Alone are echoing The Well of Loneliness. Petersen would be more convincing if she didn't fight so hard to sound watertight. No speculation on the hidden sexual imaginings of a dead women is ever going to be watertight. The Enigmatic Christina Stead is an imaginative work, not a factual one. This should have been accepted, not fought.

As a work of the imagination, The Enigmatic Christina Stead deserved to have been brightened by all of its best qualities, fecundity and honesty and play.







* The largest problem. John Livingston Lowes in The Road to Xanadu leaps to conclusions as well, but that book is a compendium of rapt love, fabulous devotion, written by an author who is excited by English -- an author who would never write "paradigm" ten times, or "signifier" on every third page, or repeat "rhizomatic writing" over and over, until this idea, which seemed so marvellous when Petersen introduced it, turns stale. No one, academic or otherwise, should feel compelled to do this. We are human beings, not daleks. Xanadu is the kind of book Enigmatic Christina Stead could have been: in fact the lesbian theory would have been a magnificent starting point for a galaxy of references, a dazzling star-system, with this glowing point of imagination at the core. At the start of chapter one we would have been scoffing; by the end we would be laughing, amused, thrilled by this alternative Stead, this figure standing next to the figure we know. "See!" we would have shouted, "how much thought and wonder has gone into the concoction of her! O brave new world, that has such people in it!" Instead I'm stuck here nitpicking about the word fairytale.

Petersen borrowed the idea of rhizomatic writing from Diana Brydon, who brought it into her discussion of the prolific and engulfing vine that surrounds the Massine house in Dogs. Just by chance I've come across it again, in this interview with the poet Pierre Joris, which was drawn to my attention by ReadySteadyBook.

Joris says:

From the beginning on it was important to me to keep the form open, and after the first rather traditional lyrics of self-discovery, I started exploring poem-sequences, mixed genres (prose / journal / poetry) and open-field poetries. In my work the logic of articulation is no longer that of a Poundian or a French Surrealist collage aesthetics. Both are beholden to classic European ideas of light vs. dark, and all that entails in terms of hierarchy. The non-hierarchical, free-moving and at times randomly articulated language units (that could be found in the street or in a philosophical text, overheard on the subway or well up from one’s psychic chora) could or should not be subjected to some single overriding aesthetic or even ethical pre-determined aim. Each one needed to be able to articulate itself with any other one, and create a vast proliferation, open on all sides for ever further egalitarian dérives. As The Beatles had it: Strawberry Fields Forever. And strawberries are of course rhizomes.

her work was, therefore

Delight today. Lisa Hill mentioned the Brotherhood Book site on LitLovers months ago, but it wasn't until last week that I found a book there that made me think, "I do want that." The book was R.G. Geering's study of Christina Stead. I mentioned it to M., and he bought it. Good man. I'd let him read it if he wanted to. I like it when you write about yourself on the blog, he says, not books I haven't read.









The Brotherhood site had it down as the original 1969 Christina Stead, but the book that arrived in the mail today was the expanded 1979 edition, which I'd rather have had anyway. The drawing of Stead on the front cover is ugly, as all drawings of her are ugly, a thing that makes me wince, because it's no secret that she was hurt by her father calling her plain when she was a teenager -- "a lazy fat lump," says Hazel Rowley's biography, quoting the memory of Christina's brother David -- and it would be kind if at least one artist could make her look slightly less foul than her photographs; instead they make her look worse. Here the left eye is drifting up diagonally into her skull. Artists, show her some pity. Stop making me wince.

As for the contents, I've only skimmed them. Geering asserts his Australian perspective from the start and carries it through to the end. Seven Poor Men of Sydney excites him -- "a most unusual novel to appear on the Australian literary scene in 1934." The Beauties and Furies "is her poorest book, but significant in a number of ways." "The color and richness of the prose in the early books has given way" in A Little Tea, a Little Chat "to a spare and chill monochrome." The critic predicts that The Puzzleheaded Girl "could become one of Christina Stead's most popular books," but so far (three decades after this revised edition was published) the prediction hasn't panned out. Someone would have to reprint it before it would stand a chance of becoming popular. In the last chapter he insists that she was not a neglected novelist in 1965, no matter what Randall Jarrell thought. I haven't seen a point of view like this argued so indignantly anywhere else.

Overseas critics who still persist in the 1965 discovery-theory should be told that her early books were being reprinted in Australia at the same time -- Seven Poor Men of Sydney in 1965 and The Salzburg Tales in paperback in 1966. For Love Alone was reissued here in 1966 and in paperback in 1969; Seven Poor Men of Sydney appeared in paperback in 1971 … Perhaps the neglect so often talked about occurred overseas rather than in Australia.

Then he relents.

It is a fact, of course, that Christina Stead's books were out of print for more than two decades and that Australians who read in their histories of the literary importance of her work were for too long unable to read it for themselves. Until the 1960s her work was, therefore, not as widely, let alone deeply, known as it deserved to be and it is rather, in this sense, that we may talk of its neglect.

of kafka and other stories

So, I stood in our local St. Vinnies, which is not, to me, the face of a gentle charitable institution that provides food and shelter to unhappy children, or a convenient social club for the elderly and disabled staff members who have nowhere else (you assume) to go, no other prospect of an assembly-room where cheerful faces wait to draw on their decades of accumulated skills -- perhaps without families, these people, perhaps lonely, suicidal, talking to their cats -- but instead a place where they once sold me the entire Alexandria Quartet for fifty cents -- therefore a business whose employees are slightly mad yet deserve to be treated with reverence, like deluded kings -- so there I stood by the video cassettes and a table of stuffed bears, thinking, "I must not buy these books. I must not buy any books." We're planning to move to the States at some point in the future, and I've been sorting out books to discard and books to leave behind. "If I buy any more books I will only have to worry about storing them in boxes and packing them and figuring out where they will go, and the cost of transportation, and what if they get lost …" and so on. "Put it back." So I put back Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories, which would have cost me fifty cents with a photograph of the author on the back cover looking glum and squashy in a hat. "Put it back." So I replaced The Letters of Rachel Henning, with an introduction and illustrations by Norman Lindsay. Then there was Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, which I held in my hand as I moved around the shop, prowling undecided past an aisle of women's long-sleeved shirts. It was the tyranny of the Famous Name that had me. Again, as with George Meredith, I was held by the Famous Name that says to you from the cover of a book, "Look, you've heard of me. You must have heard of me for a reason. I must be good. Or even if I am not good, at least I am worth a dollar. A dollar! That's nothing."* I paused here to reflect with pleasure on a mistake made by George Perec in Life a User's Manual. He had Australian characters using dollars in the 1940s and the Australian dollar wasn't introduced until 1966. I picked up the mistake, hence the pleasure. Still, Perec wrote the whole User's Manual from start to finish and barely had to revise it after the first draft. A free and clever man. And here I am on the seventh draft of an interminable book-length thing I keep fiddling with. So who wins there? Perec surely. I still didn't know what to do with Henderson the Rain King. Finally I paid for it. On the way home I tried to threaten myself with punishments: "You'll have to throw out something else to make room for that. Why did you buy Henderson the Rain King? The U.S. is bursting with copies of Henderson the Rain King. America invented Henderson the Rain King." But the cover matches my copy of The Adventures of Augie March. "Since when did you care about matching covers? Since never. If you want all your books to match, go buy a Kindle." Nnh, they're not going to sell me the Alexandria Quartet for fifty cents. "No, and they're not going to leave you wondering where to store your boxes either. No boxes! Freedom! Dill."

Fall into reverie re. storms passing across the Arizona desert outside M.'s mother's house where there is nothing but cholla and hares for miles and all that weird storm-light across the bushes.







* But not quite like Meredith, because I'd already read several Bellows. Here it was the Famous Title. But why let it have this influence?

a pair of drawers given to me

When I started typing that post yesterday I didn't think it was going to veer off onto the subject of Radclyffe Hall. I began my list of library books with George Eliot because I thought I was going to talk about Eliot. Why was I going to talk about Eliot? I was going to talk about Eliot because I looked at the cover of my new secondhand Mill on the Floss and thought, "That boy isn't wearing any pants."



(The red rectangle is a library sticker)


But no, you can see the edge of a pocket away to the right, and the crease is hanging too low for those to be his buttocks, although the length of his leg as it crosses behind the plank makes me imagine that anatomical accuracy was not this artist's strength, so maybe … but I think the pocket clinches it; also, I think Eliot wrote all of her male characters with pants. "The Victorian age was a time when men in England always had their trousers on," I reminded myself, and then I remembered the Rev. Francis Kilvert pelting naked down the beach in his Diary and reconsidered: "Oh no they didn't."

Bathing clothed irritated him.

Friday 12 June 1874

At Shanklin one has to adopt the detestable custom of bathing in drawers … To-day I had a pair of drawers given to me which I could not keep on. The rough waves stripped them off and tore them down around my ancles. While thus fettered I was seized and flung down by a heavy sea which retreating suddenly left me lying naked on the sharp shingle from which I rose streaming with blood. After this I took the wretched and dangerous rag off and of course there were some ladies looking on as I came up out of the water.

peers and posterity

My local library is too small for book sales, but the larger branch about half an hour's walk away is not. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be there while they were shedding three slightly elderly George Eliots, two volumes of the Thomas Wolfe quartet that begins with Look Homeward, Angel, a biography of Radclyffe Hall, a paperback book with a salmon cover called The Temperament of Generations: Fifty Years of Writing in Meanjin, Naguib Mafouz's The Harafish, and various other books, bought by me, who was especially glad to find the Eliots after coming to the end of Middlemarch weeks ago and realising that I had thrown away my old Mill on the Floss in Japan.

Quentin Bell mentions the Radclyffe Hall court case so briefly in his biography of Virginia Woolfe that the index only lists a single page number under her name. Hall's fifth book, the story of a lesbian aristocrat, had been judged obscene; Woolfe was willing to testify in its favour, but, "The difficulty," Bell writes

was that Miss Hall wanted her witnesses to declare that The Well of Loneliness was not only a serious, but a great work of art. This seemed too large a sacrifice in the cause of liberty.

However, the matter was compromised. Virginia went to testify at Bow Street but the magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, ruled literary evidence out of court and the novel, a sincere though feeble effort, was condemned as though it had been any other piece of cheap pornography.

He quotes a letter in which Woolfe calls Well "a meritous dull book." Sally Cline's biography of Hall admits it, but quotes another letter in which Woolfe told her sister, "I think much of Miss Hall's book is very beautiful" and refers to the shooting, in the Well, of a horse. "Her reaction to Hall's novel was ambivalent and changeable," the biographer suggests. According to Cline, Hall's desire to have people "declare that The Well of Loneliness was not only a serious, but a great work of art" began when she saw the draft of a letter that Woolfe, along with E.M. Forster, Arnold Bennet, Leonard Woolfe, and others, were proposing to send out in her support.

Despite Bennet and Forster's hard work, [Hall] was distressed at the draft letter which stressed the legal aspects of literary suppression rather than the merits of her book. Always over-sensitive to criticism, she now saw traces of it everywhere.

None of the authors who were willing to protest the banning of the book wanted to call it a worthwhile piece of literature. (Even Alison Hennegan, who wrote a favourable introduction to my copy of Well, says that it is "often unwieldy," although, she adds, "always courageous.") Cline sums up the clash between Hall and her supporters.

Although Hall and the Bloomsbury writers believed in many of the same principles, their methods of dealing with them, even of thinking about them, were diametrically opposed. Bloomsbury's writers and philosophers held most things at bay with an amused and abstract detachment. They liked spinning ideas, juggling truths, catching evasions … Hall … was by comparison simplistic and straightforward. The notion of overlapping truth did not interest her. The barbarity of suppressing 'the Truth' did.

Woolfe's Orlando was published a month before the court case began.

Hall [writes Cline] must have puzzled at length as to why Orlando … did not come under the censor's ban … it was an overt Sapphic portrait which even included photographs of the author's lover. But the difference between Woolfe's sexual presentation and Hall's was that although same-sex desire in the form of eroticized relationships between women is fundamental to Woolfe's writing, it is always emotional, elusive, imaginary, or symbolic. For Hall realism is the core … Woolfe was a satirist, a fantasist, an experimentalist. Authority left her alone. They allowed her to be judged by her literary peers and posterity.

Interesting, the difference in perspective between the two biographies: the same court case that occupies dozens of pages in one book appearing, in the other book, as not much more than a quick prelude to the appearance of a better novel by somebody else.

In another part of his biography Bell lets the reader know that his aunt was more cheerful than the public idea of her as a straitened nervous wreck would suggest, a point of view supported by the Guardian's recent interview with his half-sister Angelia Garnett: ninety-one and she's published a new book.

Of Virginia Woolf she says: "I was very fond of her and she was a very charming and delightful aunt to have. Most people seem to think she was somebody who was always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but she wasn't. She was enormous fun."

vanity is, I take it

On Tuesday afternoon I stopped by a secondhand bookstore where I found a row of dull-red George Meredith hardbacks the size of my hand - my hand with the fingers spread out very slightly - not right out, and not held together, but just relaxed and settled like a spider. Some of them had covers raised in vertical hard pinstriped ridges; these ones made a zipping noise when I ran a fingernail across the stripes. I bought The Shaving of Shagpat and went home. After that, a wave of covetousness, because I wished I'd bought The Egoist as well.

My Shagpat opens with this dedication.

To
G. Nora Young
From
George D. [?] Young
November 1906
--

"Age cannot wither her,
nor custom stale
her infinite variety."

"Antony & Cleopatra"

Why covetous? I'd never read Meredith before, I didn't know if I'd like him or hate him, so why covetous? The books were attractive, but there were other attractive books in the shop; I didn't want to buy them. The books were old, but there were other, older books there. I picked Meredith off the shelf in the first place because I'd read an essay by someone who called him a great forgotten Victorian, quoting Oscar Wilde, "His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning."* Still, I'd read other books that people praised, and I hadn't liked them, I knew this, I knew this, so why did I feel that I must have Meredith? I was irritable the next morning, short-tempered, distracted, I kept thinking of The Egoist, I was in a knot of anxiety because I was afraid that someone else would buy it. Eventually I went back and picked up the set, carried them around the shop, thought about putting them back on the shelf, didn't: paid for them - not only The Egoist but Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways, Rhoda Fleming, and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Once I had them in my hands I felt calm. The covetousness had been switched off as suddenly as a light.

I've seen people write about this kind of behaviour as if it's laudable, beautiful, joyous, exciting - I'm a bookaholic! - I must have books! - I love books! - the books are falling off my shelves yet I buy more! - books books books! - but mine was a barbaric compulsiveness, reason couldn't budge it. I know that if this had been a collection of mismatched editions, some modern paperbacks, some older books, one from the 1930s, let's say, and one from 1900, a TV-tie-in from the 1990s, a Signet Classics edition with the smudged-looking Signet cover, I might have bought The Egoist out of curiosity, remembering that it was his most famous book, but the rest wouldn't have seemed interesting. But I knew in the shop that if I left one behind I would fret over it. It was as if there was a charm over the books, marked out by the boundary line of George or G. Nora Young's signatures inside the covers.** I'd been reading about this kind of spell in the Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton identified love as a cause of melancholy, and spells as one cause of love, telling us that Charles the Great once fell in love with a woman "of mean favour and condition" because she kept a magic ring in her mouth.

The bishop went hastily to the [woman's] carcass, and took a small ring thence; upon the removal the emperor abhorred the corpse, and, instead of it, fell as furiously in love with the bishop.

Eugene Field in his little Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, makes a comparison with love.

Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very passion which he has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the essentials to a well-balanced character -- not a prodigious vanity, but a prudent, well-governed one.

But Fields is too whimsical for me: this inclusion of "prudent, well-governed," seems to mask the pointlessness of walking around a bookshop with half of George Meredith's oeuvre in my hands, wrestling against the feeling that I must buy these books that I might never read. I didn't feel prudent or well-governed - I felt disgusted, and closer to Burton:

"For love," (as Cyrus in Xenophon well observed) "is a mere tyranny, worse than any disease, and they that are troubled with it desire to be free and cannot, but are harder bound than if they were in iron chains."

*


* I don't remember who wrote this essay or where I found it. Paging through Aspects of the Novel today for a different reason I discovered that E.M. Forster thought Meredith was bad at character, that his descriptions of nature are "too fluffy and lush," that the social values in his books are "faked," but, "He is the finest contriver that English fiction has ever produced, and any lecture on plot must do homage to him."

** It looks like her first name was Gladys. The dedication inside Beauchamp's Career reads:

Glad
With love from G.D.Y.
19th Sept: 1920

various accessories of furnishing

This is a short dictionary of furniture and various accessories of furnishing made and used in England since AD 1100 and in North America since the mid-17th century. It is not a concise glossary or a comprehensive encyclopaedia. I have tried to make a book of reference that is more than a barren list of terms … and inevitably there are omissions. Like architecture, furniture is a visible record of social history. The most authoritative work on the subject is The Dictionary of English Furniture, in three superbly illustrated volumes, revised and enlarged by Mr Ralph Edwards

My copy of John Gloag's Short Dictionary of Furniture is nearly eight hundred pages long, a large orange ex-library book twenty-four centimetres by sixteen, with a kind of limp heaviness, similar to the weight of a water balloon. Life in a library has left it with tan-coloured marks in a few places along the edges of the pages, as if someone in the past tried to read the book while they had gravy on their fingers. There are small tears here and there, but it's sharper than Groote Eyland Stories, bought in the same library sale and looking as if the previous owner stored it in grey dirt.

It's one of those compendium-books, like the Oxford Book of Food and Drink, or Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (with its hints of universes), or even Nicholas Barker's Human Smoke (Goebbels was a bad judge of character), one of those books that seems (before I open it) to promise that it will contain everything I'd ever want to know, or at least this is the unreasonable hope I feel as I approach it, because it seems so neat, and so large, and once I know everything I can forget about it and go away and do something else, although what something else might be at eleven o'clock at night on a Tuesday (when I'm writing this) I don't know: eat potato chips, I think (there's an open packet of them in the kitchen).

As I come to the end of the book I wish that it could be somehow lengthened. I'm flipping from one page to another, trying to hunt down any article that I haven't read. The expanding universe I saw when I opened Furniture for the first time - all this! It'll take forever! - has shrunk and become little and familiar - I've read that (I think, flipping), I've read that (flipping more), no, I know what a tester is now, pillow beer, no, I've read that too, and hnh, it's that drawing of a bath again. Pinchbeck? I haven't read that, and so I fall on it, even though pinchbeck is only three lines long and not nearly a match for all the longer articles I've already trawled through: rocking chair, for example, or cast iron furniture and decoration, the ones I used to indulge myself with when most of the book was still unexplored veldt. Now it's shrunk down to the little back-garden-sized pinchbeck, tiny, tiny, tiny, it shrinks like life.

Pinchbeck. An alloy of copper and zinc, resembling gold in colour and ductility. Invented in 1732 by Christopher Pinchbeck, a London clock and watch maker. (See also Prince's Metal.)

But I'm writing this because these books aren't meant to have climaxes, they're all-over books, plotless, of course, and yet, reading the timeline at the end of the Short Dictionary, a timeline that sketches out various changes furniture went through in Britain between 1100 and 1950, I felt a climax here -

16th century (1500-1558)

All the articles in use in the Medieval period, but with many improvements in design.

- as if I'd reached the high point of a novel. It was the summary of ideas just there that did it, I think: after the fog of examples in the main body of the book, the storms of chairs, and floods of cupboards, the histories of ornamentation, the rivalries between London cabinet-makers, the quotes from Chaucer ("And in his owne chamber hen made a bed / With sheets and with chalons faire y-spred," is quoted under bed), the candle-beam evolving over centuries into the Chippendale chandelier, sprouting from there into the gasolier (for gas jets) and electrolier ("A hideous word," writes James Gloag, who is a man unafraid of his own opinions), and just odd-sounding words, for example, fustic, thermed foot, langsettle, everything is finally crystallised in this, and other sentences like it, modest and spare. I wanted to applaud the human race for being so clear and so rational and at the same time so large and so particular, one inside the other.

haste thee, nymph

On Saturday I found a collection of old brown paper chapbooks, stained and falling apart at the spine, the ex-property of a girl named Dorothy Snudden, probably dead by now, because the date pencilled inside one of the covers under her name is 6/12/17. Dead Dorothy Snudden.

One of the booklets is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, one is Henry Longfellow's Evangeline, one is Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, one is Oliver Goldsmith and The Traveller, and one is Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur and The Lady of Shalott.





Right near "And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on and so did I," in the Ancient Mariner the owner has written Alma Duncan but there doesn't seem to be any connection between them besides the placement. I mean, it doesn't look as if she thought Alma Duncan was a slimy thing. She was only looking for a place to write the name. At the back of the book she's pencilled her own name five times with different emphases and decorated it with shapes that might be clouds or jellyfish or only curly doodles, although one of the curly doodles might be turning into the name Lily, emerging from a sort of umbrella or curved awning, and another one perhaps Eileen.

Next to "Like one, that on a lonesome road …" and "… behind him tread" she has drawn ticks and added, very wonderful.

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head ;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Evangeline is unmarked and the Goldsmith is unmarked. Then you open L'Allegro, expecting it to be unmarked too, but here, only here, the margins are tangly with her pencil lines … sketched butterflies and flowers …

dust, swirling beneath me

Last week I discovered a two-dollar copy of David Malouf's An Imaginary Life at the local St Vincent's and felt delighted. This is the same St Vincent's where I found his book of short stories, Dream Stuff, and also a Johnno, parts of the story underlined by a student, and, inside the cover, the name of the student, who might now (I looked him up) be the Head of Mortgage Credit Intelligence at the National Australia Bank. His Facebook profile picture, if this is the same person, suggests that he owns a black wetsuit and a jetski, or would like to.

On one page he has underlined this:

Johnno cared for nothing and nobody. No crime was beyond him. He was a born liar and an elegant shoplifter, who could walk through Woolworths at a steady pace and emerge with his shirt fairly bulging with model cars, pencil sharpeners, rubbers, exercise books, wind-up teddy bears, toy trumpets -- anything you liked to name.

My other Maloufs came from library sales. Remembering Babylon, a piece of prose as beautiful as the day, a book that was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Booker, won the inaugural IMPAC, the Prix Baudelaire, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Best Foreign Novel at the Prix Femina, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and a Best Novel prize from the Los Angeles Times, is underscored, footnoted, the margins crammed with jagged grey pencil remarks:

Fairytale opening opportunity to see something extraordinary

George is inadequate

Everybody language is foreign

The person who wrote in this book has one symbol of their own, like an O with a stroke through it, that I haven't worked out yet. I thought at first it was @, but they don't seem to be using it that way.

In darkness one light shows O hope

On the title page of this Imaginary Life someone has written, Dea Lea, And this is really my favourite book! T, while someone else, possibly Lea, has tucked a clean envelope with "Nancy Joan" on it in curly blue ball-point between pages sixteen and seventeen, leaving me to me wonder if she ever got past that point in the story. Malouf's narrator is dreaming that he has left the building where he is sleeping and walked over the surface of a river "which swirled like smoke under me and I was moonlight.

I came to the further bank. A vast plain stretched away, flat, flat, featureless, it was all dust, swirling beneath me, and out of the dust no creature stirred, not a serpent even. It was original."

He means that it was newly-formed, virgin, unique, but when I read that last line as I was typing it out just then (not suffused in the book but flipping it open casually it at the stiff part where the envelope still sits) I read it in a tone-deaf way, as if it had been written for Kath & Kim, and I saw the narrator by the river, looking at this plain, whining, "It was original, it was noice, it was un-yew-suwul," because "It was original" is a natural Kath & Kim line.

In an instant, without thinking about it, I reconceived the entire book like that, seeing the picture I'd had of it before, elated, thoughtful, submerged, stirring, running concurrently with another picture, brash, noisy, declarative, and the narrator jerking about like a fluorescent light. Just for that moment, I thought: "I had this book wrong when I read it the first time. Of course - Malouf is Australian - so is Kath & Kim - if Imaginary Life is like Kath & Kim then that makes sense. Why couldn't I see it? It's cultural" - and an argument for An Imaginary Life being written in the tone of Kath & Kim assembled itself in my mind. Somehow the bones of the story remained the same but now the narrator, Ovid, approached everything in a changed way. He didn't care that he couldn't speak the language in his exile-village. When he wanted to make someone understand he shouted and enunciated like a bad tourist. He treated everybody as if they were stupid, he wasn't humble for a second, he made an exasperated moue at the story's feral boy and asked him why he had to be so difficult.

Trying to describe this now is like trying to describe a dream, this half-and-half piece of writing that existed solidly in my mind for a few moments, taking shape like a flash of real insight, as if I had finally outfoxed a problem. The world with this centaur-book in it was the world I lived in, and had always lived in without knowing it.

In the next paragraph there is an apparition of men and horses and Ovid believes he is seeing gods.