Weaving

I have read--heard, via CD--George Eliot's Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe-and what a curious limping book it is, revisited after many years. Her texture is determinedly, almost patronizingly, fustian: the cloth of the humble. Her novel is absolutely the counterpart of the approved paintings of her day: so *competent*, so *careful*; scenes of local color fussily laid out, with suitable "realism" and "touches of humor," with "typical" flat characters in the middle distance, to fill out the landscape around the wronged weaver and his little charge. Only one character can be said to develop--Marner himself. Eppie's place, as the sign of human values supplanting merely commercial interest--her golden locks, in infancy, seen by near-sighted Marner as golden coins--is spelled out so insistently that she hardly rises to the level of symbol. Eliot's fondness for melodrama, and the shrinking from certain realities that accompanies it, generates the embarrassing crisis at the heart of the novel--Cass' opium-addled first wife, Molly, dying in the snow, leaving her child to wander to Silas' cottage. Eliot, despite the unconventionality of her own life, had to damn Molly with opium, yet could not bring herself to make darling Eppie a bastard. Yet, Eliot's real gift, her wise and observing mind, peeks out in the parenthetical observations about truth, memory, faith, and the action of time, like a child peering out from around a curtain.

A Dream

I have often remarked that I dream in architecture.
Two nights ago, doubtless partly enchanted by Dayquil, I dreamed that I was in a city, as familiar to me as Boston, but New York in its essentials. I missed a bus, but knew that the next bus, although a different number and route, would serve me just as well. After we had traveled for some blocks, the bus lifted directly into the air, like a kitten seized by a hawk. We were all a little fearful, but we came to know without quite being told, as is true in dreams, that it was possible to charter some buses, for enough money, for special purposes--weddings, funerals, receptions--and that our bus, at great expense, was being transported, by a machine we could not see, and at whose ingenuity and scale we could only guess, to the top of a highrise building--like a funicular, but straight up into the sky. Just before we came to our destination, the bus transformed itself into a mattress, and the population of the bus shrank to a handful. We disembarked, and the mattress slid into the garage-like aperture in the side of the building, like a sheet of paper into a drawer.
I found myself not on a tall building, but again on the ground. Just behind the grimy whitewashed structures that faced me was a silent grass-grown park: side by side, facing the east, were the ruins of two buildings. Their facades were like those of Classical temples, but I understood them at once as rival churches. Little remained but these faces, and the beginnings of the side walls; so long had they been abandoned that the moss and grass had covered them over entire and made them more green than stone; surrounding them, at a little distance, were overgrown and toppled tombstones. I came to know--as one does--that these churches and the little precinct that surrounded them--had been quarantined and left behind during a yellow fever epidemic in the early nineteenth century, and somehow rested, secret and undisturbed, in the very midst of a modern and crowded city.
Part Boston--part "New England" (the rival churches)--part New York--and a good deal of Rome, where so many ruins with strange antique stories lie beside modern steel and paving.

The Wonder of England

To while away the irksome drive to my second job and back--an hour and more in each direction--I listened to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, read by Irene Sutcliffe, after five or six years away from Austen, excepting perhaps Persuasion--and was dumbfounded by the brilliance, the majestic assurance, of this great novelist. Never did I feel that her characters had been "worked up" from other writers' characters, or the pages of a chronicle, as in Scott or Hawthorne; never did I feel that they had been wheezed into existence for an idea's sake, as in Radcliffe or Shelley (he or she). For pages--quarter-hours--at a time, I found myself delighted by her apt deployment of dialogue or situation, half-forgetting that Austen, more than animating Bennets and Darcys, had created the whole--scenes, settings, houses, and parks. How deftly, in her comic deflation of moral certainties, she created the space in which true moral development might be shown; how wittily, judiciously, sparingly, she interjected her own little moralia. I have often thought--and this fresh encounter did nothing to change my mind--that Austen's writing was the last harvest of the eighteenth century; that she was, just as I think she must have hoped, a spiritual daughter to Richardson and Johnson. But how much finer, to our taste; how much more laughter. Richardson's eye for situation, without his frenzied fascination with sexuality; Johnson's wisdom, without his sententious gloom. Generating interest from crime and sex, always the first resort of the writer, is comparatively easy--without apparent effort, Austen understood the gravity, the symbolic power, of those little actions that determine the happiness of men and women. How faint and half-hearted most novelists look beside her! How fortunate we are, in the English language, to catch her singular prose, her signature tunes, first-hand!

A-Roma

Every city has its signature smell--some strange potpourri of local earths and waters and human habits. All this past fortnight I could smell Rome again, wherever I was: an absolutely distinctive stew of honey, lemon, damp stone, a discreet backdrop of pine sap, and beneath it all, a benign note of decay, as though something had gone slightly wrong in the bottom of the refrigerator. It brings back the wide swing of the Via Veneto, the gravel walks around the Palazzo Borghese, the seagods splendid in mosaic at Ostia, the upraised arm of Christ and his mother's half-shielded face in Michelangelo's Last Judgment--and the faces of my friends there, my cousin Elisabeth, her husband Michael, and their little boys...
Why should I recall Rome so vividly now?

Shoes and the child's mind

This last week, my forbidden pleasure has been Noel Streatfeild's 1937 novel, Ballet Shoes. What a document of the Depression, a vanished era in the theatre, and the child's mind it is--not to mention charming almost beyond its author's merits. The story, as you will recall, concerns three orphans, improbably and separately rescued from disaster by a paleontologist, eccentric in a storybook manner. Before he leaves them with his hapless niece Sylvia, the children dub him "Gum" (Great Uncle Matthew); with equal whimsical improbability, he gives them the common surname Fossil. They call Sylvia--who is neither their mother nor their nurse--Garnie, a childish corruption of "Guardian," and as in the Mitfords and their "Hons" and "Bod," these childhood nicknames take on an almost sacred, immutable quality. The remainder of the novel gives itself to the story of the Fossil sisters' gradual rise in the theatre--the lively half-world of pantomimes and matinees that employed London children before the era of Annie or Cats. They are lucky, each of them, to have a distinctive talent, but much of the book is devoted to their work--the assiduous daily training they undergo at Madame Fidolia's Academy, hours of home tutoring from their spinster-schoolteacher boarders (likely a lesbian couple?)--and the achievement and even joy they derive from their efforts. It is a fantasy of real life in its florets of whimsy (of course the boarders supply their educational and emotional wants precisely! of course Gum re-emerges like a deus ex machina!) --but of genuine fantasy and magic, there is none; nor do we desire any. What is most striking is Streatfeild's uncanny recollection of what satisfies the child's mind, male or female. Conversation is rarely long or sentimental; her heroines are never little philosophers or psychologists, but genuine children, kind, selfish, and hard by turns. She lavishes her novelist's attention on their clothing--crucial dresses and outfits--and on food they enjoy and long for (and sometimes lack). She remembers, somehow, what we forget: the child's almost fetishistic love for real, tangible things (clothing, toys, food), around which wishes and fantasies can cluster. Her children's lives are semi-magical; but the children themselves are never false or sugary.

Removal to the Winter Palace; Foremost; Stung

Tonight, now that the weather has begun to turn, I will again begin to sleep upstairs, having latterly slept, in this strange, disquieting, unseasonal heat, on the futon bed in the guest room. In a mood of enchantment brought on by Murasaki Shikibu and Kenneth Rexroth's anthology of Japanese women poets, how can I not think of this as a counterpart to one of the Emperor's ritualized moves from palace to palace? I am lacking only--well, I am lacking layered multicolored robes, palanquins of hidden beauties, Shinto rites, fawning courtiers, flowering trees--and an Empire.
This morning, to my dismay, I was selected for a brief criminal trial. My prior experience has been that I have precisely the sort of education that makes one, in a lawyer's eyes, uppity--but I was not spared this time, or rather, I was honored with the privilege to serve. I was foreman for the six-person jury, and it was not difficult for us to arrive at a unanimous verdict in our little larceny case.
Last night, I confronted a wasp at my back door, hovering in what appeared to be a state of meditation near the top of the back door window. No Buddhist, I swatted at her with the bit of cloth I had in my hand, and she fell, as far as I could ascertain, to the mudroom rug. I went out on my errand, but as I grasped the inner knob to close the door again, I felt a sharp pain, like the entry of a pin, into my right thumb: my first wasp sting. My remarks on the wasp's character and morals do not bear repeating: suffice it to say that she fell at once to the ground, and is now stinging with the angels.
Since this was my first venture with Aculeata, I was curious to learn how I might react. "Well, " I reasoned, if I die in the next twenty minutes, I'm allergic." I went upstairs, washed, applied rubbing alcohol, and then a little witches' brew of antibiotic and analgesic ointments, wrapped in two bandaids. So far, so good.

Aghast

It is disappointing to report how disappointing Gregory Maguire's Wicked seems to me. I did not, and do not, resist the appropriation and re-evaluation of a familiar story--I welcome it, as the ground of, for instance, some of Angela Carter's most imaginative writing; Tanith Lee's; Robin McKinley. Maguire's book, however, depressed me by the heavy, groping quality of its language. The novelist, unable to create or sustain a character, gives all his poor puppets a gleeless variety of ill-correlated emotions: they are all, male, female, human, or otherwise, all over the map. I was dismayed by the relentless, childish dwelling on excretion and swelling; every one of the players is venal and vulgar. In a great novel, even the foolish and wicked are not entirely beyond our understanding; the good writer's central characters suffer and laugh as we would, and so we join in their deeds and sorrows. What a fool Emma Woodhouse is! And Gwendolen Harleth! but we love them. We want to shake Emma Bovary out of her stupid dreams, but we love her. Nowhere in Wicked are we inclined to love, even in disbelief and despair.
Worst of all, perhaps, Maguire, in his superficial cleverness, has traduced and diminished the brilliant whimsy of Baum. Baum's world was never without its shadows and puzzles and mysteries: but his Oz was a place of near-volcanic creative energy, where anything might happen. Maguire's Oz is a police state--nowhere you'd want to raise a child.

Briareus Writes a Poem

Generally, Yahoo may be relied upon to filter spam, but today,
one spam got through the filter, and I perhaps unwisely
read it. Below the usual subject line, advertising
cheap diet pills (not Viagra this time), I read:
"Like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!
And so I gaze avidly
Down the road, at Cypress Gardens, a woman
Against which we have been projected? What . . .
This drizzling three-day January thaw,
And piled up at the base of the columns
In a single floral stroke,
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
XVI. Laying a Ghost: The Jeannette and the Fram
on their own little seat cushions, wearing soft caps
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Away, my songs, must we go
Swaying in unison beneath the snow,
Toward the still dab of white that oscillates
Against this sky no longer of our world.
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
to try that, to hold a terrifying beast
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
That desire has ever built, have approached"
This seems to be a ragout of lines of verse harvested from all over the Net--
I've identified one line of Robert Pack
and one of Victor Hugo. I haven't enough ambition to investigate all of them...
The effect is as though the Hechatoncheires, the hundred-handed, fifty-headed
giants of Greek myth, wrote a poem in idiot imitation of their betters.
How like the Web they are--incalculably strong, inarguable, ferocious,
grasping, thoughtless, seizing fragments and bits for a ridiculous
but high-sounding omelette of words. And yet, how like
certain poems by John Ashbery or Leslie Scalapino the result is...

The Acrobat

Her name is Marie--the papier-mache acrobat : her career remains unknown.
My erstwhile housemate informs me that she received Marie as a gift years ago--more than that we still do not know.

An End in View; Natural Narcissism; My Acrobat

I slipped Disc 10 of the audio version of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise this morning. Nemirovksy's skill, and her complex compassion for her characters, has not failed. Since she died in 1942--in the camps--she was in no sense a post-Holocaust or post-Nazi writer: she declines to demonize the German soldiers who occupy the second novel in the "suite" as they occupy the little country town--I wonder if she would have felt that luxury if she had walked out of the camps, or even if she had learned of their horrors from the safety of England or America in 1945. It is a salutary lesson for us: before they became a byword--a trite byword--for repression and evil, German soldiers were men.
And I feel the sorrow one does on finishing a great and important book for the first time. There is no recovery of that first naivete: it is like the uneasy transition from the "crush" to liking or love or indifference.
I drew my class--sleepy on a Friday--through poems by Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith. I made a case for the true Romantic's benign narcissism: leaving the crowded highway of satire and social verse (Pope's Rape of the Lock, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Crabbe's great narratives) for the lone poppy in the field, the solo vista over sleeping London, seeking the self mirrored in nature. It is interesting to see how loud and persistent that subjectivism is...
Seated in a miniature Adirondack chair that makes the base of a lamp in my kitchen is a mystifying figure--a jointed papier-mache woman, left behind by my former housemate years ago. For some time, she was seated a little precariously inside a papier-mache mold of my friend Rachel's foot, where she jostled for space with Maurice Sendak monsters and stale candied almonds. Now her repose has more dignity, undercut only by her casual attire. Looked at casually, she seems naked, or clothed in the least underthings, but I realized a few months ago that her clothing--painted on--is a faded acrobat's outfit. From this and from her fixed papier-mache coiffure, she could be a hundred years old. What was she?--an exile from a jointed circus? Too frail for dedicated children's play, she must have been created for display--but what?

Good nights and days, Irene

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is accompanying me on my daily jaunts to Hartford--as new as the translation is, there is already a recorded version on CD. No single work of fiction has impressed me as thoroughly and as deeply since I first read War and Peace. Have I read her equal, and Tolstoy's equal, in these intervening years? of course--but Nemirovsky is for me, as for most of the world, a discovery, and encountering her has the delight of the unexpected. The first novel of two that she completed in what was to have been a five-novel sequence depicts the flight of several people, singles, couples, and families, from Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Nemirovsky's deft management of the shifts in the narrative from the collective to the particular, her quick, mercurial, razor-sure creations of and delineations of character are not less than dazzling.
And this is another of the Nazi murders: she died in the camps in 1942. Russian-Jewish by extraction, she thought and felt and wrote as a French woman. This is the very essence of the crude, stupid, reductive racism of the Nazis: Nemirovsky's uniqueness is dismissed for an accident of birth that did not define her. How many more Nemirovskys did the Nazis murder? the Stalinist purges? It's all very well, with Gray, to mope for "mute inglorious Miltons"--but his poor shepherd-boys and thwarted lights died in their beds.

Wednesday night and Thursday morn

How the night owl blinks and gasps, confronted with the morning...
My alarm is set now for 6 a.m., and in what already is a half-darkness, neither night nor day, my eye falls on the spines of Christina Stead's Ocean of Story, and her last and unfinished novel, I'm Dying Laughing. "UNO 1945," which appears in Ocean, is a brilliant, despairing piece, about an ill-fated couple that cannot quite reconcile themselves either to Communism or the rapacious Hollywoodized capitalism that surrounds them. They are much given to what V. S. Pritchett, trying to understand what Dorothea Brooke's marriage would have been like *after* we close Middlemarch, called the infuriating stupidity of the intellectual. Likewise Stead's Emily and Stephen. They know too much, they weigh too many opinions: their lives are a blur, and they cannot act. The story, when she expanded it into that last novel, collapsed. Like her heroines, Stead had a stream of brilliant but unfocused words at her disposal--only once, really, did they simmer into the great tragedy, The Man Who Loved Children.
Mist is still burning sluggishly off the fields of Amherst as I drive gradually south...

Farewell to all that, my darling

Dear Teleboobie:
How can I say goodbye after so many years? when did we meet--was it really more than thirty years ago? You must have been in your early twenties then, while I was--well, I won't say just how young I was when you seduced me--there are supposed to be laws against such things, but they're honored in the breach everywhere nowadays.
You have had so many styles. When I first new you, it was all black and white, but as you've aged, you've taken to wearing more and more color--it's downright garish now. And what loquaciousness you've taken on of late! years ago, when you spoke, it was only in three or four voices; now you have hundreds of things to say all at once. So much movement and changefulness and noise. I can't see how you can find the energy at your age; but you do, and there's no sign that you'll slow down.
How many sweet memories I have of you--so many wonderful, terrible, gladdening, distressing sights you have shown me: Mary Tyler Moore's hat careering into the air. The Michelin Tire Man--or was it an astronaut--walking unsteadily through the airless black curtain over the white moondust. Edith Bunker racing out of her kitchen away from the rapist she'd just attacked with a plate of brownies. Jed Bartlet scolding his God under the gentle arches of the National Cathedral. The sickening collapse of the Towers. So many sights to see.
Here is the part that is so hard for me. I need more than you have ever been able to offer. You talk--there is no end to the stream of your talk--but you don't listen. In all that sound, there is no substance. I keep waiting for an intelligible idea, a message, just a single message--and there is none. I am beginning to think that you can't grasp what it might mean to have an idea. You show me so much--but you never illuminate what you show. Spreading light and shedding light are not quite the same thing, my dear, and you have never understood that.
So, this is the end. I have unplugged you. Yes, I've left you before-- the last time, I left you for Leo Tolstoy, do you remember that? I was reading War and Peace, which has all your beauties and more, and you seemed so foolish and empty beside Natasha...Yes, I'm sure I'll see you in other places. I know I'm not your only victim--or do you call them "friends"? I'll see you in other houses--in clubs and stadiums and airplanes. I'll nod; I might even say hello. I won't pretend we've never met.
Will I be back? I said never last time--when I went off with Tolstoy. I'm human; I'm fallible-who can say? But this I know--you won't miss me.

30 August 2007--day for night

A very fitful night. I started awake at 2:40 a.m. to find local public television about to broadcast a show on Nureyev's Russian years. "What an *odd* thing!" I thought. "Who remembers Nureyev in a gangsta-Paris Hilton-wretched-excess world, much less that he was Russian?" They were endearingly candid about his sexuality, and the early clips reminded us all how uneven his technique was, pre-Fonteyn--but how full of life and speed he was. I drifted back to sleep on a pillow I've punched out of shape, to find, in my dreams, Daniel, alive again, driving around a night-time city sparkling with lights, the two of us in a rambling conversation about who had been living where and doing what when we met and moved in together. In the dream, there was much laughter and agreement, but when I gave up and swam to consciousness again, I saw that all the details were wrong, were frankly fictional.