The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano died this week. I love his writing, my favourite being The Book of Embraces. I have bought numerous copies of this title over the years, all but one of which I have given to family and friends. It is that kind of book: true to its title, it demands sharing.
The Book of Embraces defies classification, being partly prose, poetry, fiction, history and autobiography. At a very rough guess it contain more than 200 entries, the longest just two pages in length.
Some of my favourites:
Dreams at the end of the exile/1
Helena dreamed she was trying to close her suitcase and couldn’t, and she pushed down on it with both hands and knelt on it and sat on top of it and stood on top of it, and it wouldn’t budge. Mysteries and belongings gushed from the suitcase that wouldn’t close.
Grapes and wine
On his deathbed, a man of the vineyards spoke into Marcela’s ear. Before dying, he revealed his secret:
“The grape,” he whispered, “is made of wine.”
Marcela Perez-Silva told me this, and I thought: If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are.
Resurrections/1
Acute myocardial infarct, death clawing at the center of my chest. I spent two weeks sunk in a hospital bed in Barcelona. Then I sacrificed my tattered Porky 2 address book, which was falling apart, and although I could not help it, as I changed address books, I relived the years since the sacrifice of Porky 1. While I was transferring names, addresses and telephone numbers to the new book, I was also getting a clear perspective on the muddle of times and people I had been living with, a whirlwind of many deep joys and sorrows, and this was a prolonged mourning for the dead who had remained in the dead zone of my heart, and a long, much longer celebration of those still alive who fired my blood and swelled my surviving heart. And there was nothing bad and nothing odd about the fact that my heart had broken from so much use.
CQ
An interesting piece on ‘last words’ in The Conversation [http://theconversation.com/that-final-vowel-reading-seamus-heaneys-last-poem-32539] encouraged me to reflect on, not so much final words themselves but more how we interpret them. I suspect this is particularly true when we consider the poet.
When Seamus Heaney died, much attention was given to the last words he uttered, via text, to his wife: ‘Do not be afraid’. Heaney actually typed the words in Latin, ‘Noli timeri’, which, ironically given the poet’s own superlative classical translation expertise, was misspelt in various media transcriptions [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/how-so-many-people-got-seamus-heaneys-last-words-wrong/279330/].
As The Conversation article suggests, Heaney’s last poem – a mediation on a painting of a canal by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte and completed just 10 days before the poet’s death – cannot escape being analysed in the context of the imminent demise of the poet’s voice. I have always struggled with this issue, which is that we too often gravitate towards a contextual interpretation of poetry, as if the words alone, unexplained, are not enough. For my MA dissertation I argued that the work of Robert Lowell was inappropriately and unfairly adjudicated against the background of the poet’s bipolar condition. I argued for an appreciation of his works purely in the context in which the poet himself presented them.
It is tempting and too easy to over interpret, to satisfy a base and human need to explain everything away. Which goes against the very essence of poetry, where words can stand defiantly alone, and have the power to transport you elsewhere, and manywhere, as such.
Heaney:
‘A poem should take you somewhere different…a poet should be the one least likely to step into the same river twice.’
CQ
I am going through a Tartt phase, non-chronologically.
I wasn’t sure about the most recent The Goldfinch (my first read, it just didn’t grab me), loved The Secret History (it surprised and seduced), and tonight have embarked upon The Little Friend.
Which brings me to openers. I am obsessed by first sentences and paragraphs. Think Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart:
“My father still lives back in the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn’t yet missed a day of letting me down.”
Storytelling magic.
In Tartt’s The Little Friend, the opener is good, very good:
“For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it.”
Loaded.
Tantalising.
Irresistible.
CQ
By chance, this is the second Margaret Drabble novel that I have read in recent weeks. I came across a second hand copy of the 1965 The Millstone in Paris a few weeks ago, a book I had not read for some decades.
The Pure Gold Baby was first published in 2013. Having just read two Margaret Drabble novels written almost 50 years apart, I can see both what seduces me in her writing, and also what can challenge the reader. Drabble’s prose tends to have minimal dialogue, and is both intense and dense in terms of content and word. Yet, to skip over a sentence or a paragraph renders the reading experience incomplete and much less satisfying.
As a result, reading The Pure Gold Baby, although a relatively short book at less that 300 pages, takes time and commitment. Which it deserves.
The novel tells the story, narrated by a friend, of Jess and her daughter Anna, the gold baby of the title. Anna was the result of a short affair between Jess, an academic and an anthropologist, and her professor. A delightful and good-natured child, it slowly became apparent that Anna had developmental problems – she was clumsy, uncoordinated, slow to walk and to talk, and never mastered reading. There was no definitive diagnosis, but a vague label of ‘learning difficulties’ and ‘special needs’, which necessitated alternative schooling and an inability to lead an independent life, hovered over Anna’s and Jess’s lives:
‘Anna’s condition did not seem to answer with any precision to any known conditions. Like the shoebill, she was of her own kind, allotted her own genus and species. She did not suffer from any metabolic disorder, of either rare or frequent incidence. Brain damage in the womb or at birth was not ruled out, but could not be confirmed…An obvious genetic cause was sought in vain.’
Anna’s problems were not immediately obvious, especially to strangers. As a result, no leeway was given to her, which caused much anxiety for Jess as well as confusion as to the extent to which she should protect her daughter from the insensitivity of others.
The story largely concerns Jess’s life as she watches over and protects her much loved daughter. Drabble’s narrative style fascinates – not just how she unfolds the lives and thoughts of her characters, but also the details she delivers on the society that her characters inhabit.
The Pure Gold Baby is set in an earlier mid/late 20th century England – ‘We didn’t known about cholesterol then. It hadn’t been invented’. It is also the tail-end of the era of asylums. Colney Hatch, the Friern Barnet asylum that had been purpose-built in 1850 was being slowly decommissioned at the time; ‘Colney Hatch’ at the time had become slang for ‘barmy’. There is also reference to ‘the experimental programmes of R.D. Laing’, and his community based management of schizophrenics at Kingsley Hall:
‘ ‘Yes,’ said Susie, ‘Kingsley Hall was Liberty Hall, that’s what I heard. No rules, no discipline. The patients did what they liked; they didn’t have to take their medication if they didn’t want. They could stay in bed all day if they fancied. They could paint the walls with shit if they wanted.’ ‘
In part a social study against the backdrop of the evolving narrative of the lives of Jess and Anna, the novel also contains many literary and anthropological references, including Melanie Weiss’s Bagration Island, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, and the writings of Proust and Wordsworth amongst many others.
The ‘new forms of asylum, of the communities of the mad where the sick were reborn or, as a phrase of the day had it, rebirthed’, took on a personal significance for Jess when her friend, the ‘depressed poet’ Steve, attempted suicide. Steve successfully recuperated in a new 1960s therapeutic unit in Essex. This event poignantly highlighted a significant different between Steve’s condition and Anna’s – ‘There was material in Steve’:
‘Anna’s condition was not very interesting, except to Jess. It lacked drama and progress and the possibility of a surprising or successful outcome…Whereas Steve was in need, and might respond to a cure, and in a suitable haven, recover.’
Much happens and challenges the day to day lives of Jess and Anna. But theirs is not an unhappy or ultimately sorrowful story:
‘I will leave [Jess and Anna] in mid-air, but you will know that they landed safely…’
Earlier, the narrator shares a more fatalistic viewpoint while listening to Sibelius:
‘The natural world would survive us whatever we did to it. We could cement and tarmac it over and turn it into a motorway a mile wide, but it would break through in the end. That’s what Sibelius was telling us.’
The Pure Gold Baby is a rich, textured and complex book. At the very least it is a story of mothering, of the challenges that face those who do not fit into our idea of ‘normal’, and of what loving and being loved can overcome. The personal also interweaves with a social and anthropological narrative.
I was consumed and enriched by the sum of much more than 291 pages of text.
CQ
If, like me, you thought John William’s Stoner [https://sufferingandthearts.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/stoner/] was one of the best books you have ever read, check out Train Dreams. It is a very different read, at a mere 116 pages, but Stoner was much in my mind while experiencing Train Dreams. It may well be the fact that both follow the life of one man, an alone and ultimately tragic (or so it seems to me) figure. It is also not luck that brought Train Dreams to my attention. The same person who gifted me Stoner recommended Denis Johnson’s work. Such is the magic of the reading experience. It connects people and events and episodes in ways that might not otherwise be possible.
I am not sure how much I liked the central character in both books (Howard Jacobson would probably say that the need to like characters misses the whole point of writing and reading), yet this did not stop me connecting with each and both, and with their stories of living and suffering.
Train Dreams opens with the ending of a stranger’s life:
‘In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.’
It ends:
‘And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.’
The intervening 100 pages or so follow Grainier’s adult life, which is dominated by loss, hardship and solitude. Yet Grainier is not a victim. He lives his life as he does and must, without questioning his suffering. He does, however, ultimately release and express and share what he has been holding within, in a way that is both surprising and beautiful.
Both Stoner and Train Dreams inevitably raises questions about what constitutes a life. Certainly, a life can be told in 100 pages, or 300, or whatever length. But what Williams and Johnson, exceptionally and in very different ways have done, is to share the essence of a lived life, the somethings that touch on and reach out to a humanness in us all.
CQ
Living through the Arts 