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...
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