The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

A Doris Lessing notebook

The Lessing Woman:

Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way as people once talked about the Hemingway Man. The Lessing Woman is a formidable female. She hasn't been to a university but she has read everything and remembers it. Her ideals are high and unsullied. She works (or has worked) at lost political causes. Although she loathes marriage, she gamely raises children and endures domestic woes. She cooks well, keeps a spotless house (except when depressed) and does excellent writing, research or secretarial work. She is any man's moral and intellectual superior, and she rarely hesitates to tell him so.

I was being domestic this morning, cleaning. For some reason I opened a drawer I almost never open. In it are some old work contracts, an address book, and, for some reason, two books that I keep separate from all the other hundreds of books in the house: Kwiaty Polskie, a volume of poetry by Julian Tuwim, in Polish; and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I took out the Notebook and fondled it; I like the feel of my edition, I like the look of all its not quite gold-hued lines. Not an hour later, in a meeting with the rep for my daughter's education fund, my phone alerted me that Doris Lessing had died.

My first Lessing book was The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five, in a course on dystopian fiction, when I was 18. I've been reading Lessing regularly ever since.

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, Prelude. Music, Philip Glass; libretto, Doris Lessing.

Lectures
Nobel lecture
Monique Beudert Memorial Lecture

Obituaries
Margaret Atwood, The Guardian: "She was political in the most basic sense."
Lorna Sage, The Guardian: "Commitment was one of the things from which she weaned herself away."
Lisa Allardice, The Guardian: "Lessing seemed to have an almost uncanny genius for pre-empting problems or social change."
Maev Kennedy, The Guardian: "Few writers have as broad a range of subject and sympathy."
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent: "Crucially, she also shook the dust of successive movements, styles and ideologies from her ever-restless feet: communism; feminism; psychoanalysis; social realism."
Charlie Jane Anders, io9: "Lessing was a master of combining characters with rich inner lives with a general hint of strangeness in the world around them."
Helen T. Verongos, The New York Times: "She divorced herself from all 'isms'."
Vicki Barker, NPR: "She was a campaigner against racism, a lover, an ardent communist, and a serial rescuer of cats."
Gaby Wood, The Telegraph: "How many women can be said to have been thought of as an Angry Young Man?"
Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post: "Cantankerous, irascible, outspoken, she thrived on controversy and outrage."

Excerpts
The Cleft
"Dialogue"
"How I Finally Lost My Heart"
On Cats
"Our Friend Judith"

Commentary
The Fifth Child
The Golden Notebook
The Good Terrorist
The Grandmothers
Mara and Dann
Memoirs of a Survivor
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

A quick review of this blog shows that I've managed to mention Doris Lessing while writing about Jim Crace, Jeanette Winterson, Keith Scribner, Lionel Shriver, Allen Kurzweil, China Miéville, Penelope Mortimer. She is a baseline. (And of there writers, I think only Miéville is in the same league as her, of the same ilk.)

Thank you, Doris Lessing, for introducing me to Patrick Hamilton, George Gissing, Anna Kavan. And for planting the idea that Charles Dickens would be good in bed (Tolstoy, not so much).

I do not believe that one can be changed by a book (or by a person) unless there is already something present, latent or in embryo, ready to be changed. Books have influenced me all my life. I could say as an autodidact — a condition that has advantages and disadvantages — that books have made me what I am. But it is hard to say of this book or that one: it changed me. How about War and Peace? Fathers and Sons? The Idiot? The Scarlet and the Black? Remembrance of Things Past? But now they all seem dazzling stages in a long voyage of discovery, which continues.

So I cannot say that Doris Lessing changed me, but she helped me recognize that I was ready to be changed, on several occasions.

Looking for China

Sometime he directed me to one or another of his online projects. That was how I realised that Aykan was a virtuoso of programming. Once, on one of our infrequent rendezvous, I called him a hacker. He burst out laughing, then got very angry with me.

"Fucking hacker?" He laughed again. "Fucking hacker?" Listen bro, you're not talking to some sebum-faced little sixteen-year-old geekboy with wank-stained pants who calls himself Dev-L." He swore furiously. "I'm not a fucking hacker, man, I'm a fucking artist, I'm a hardworking wage slave, I'm a concerned motherfucking citizen, whatever you want, but I'm not a fucking hacker."

— from "An End to Hunger," in Looking for Jake, by China Miéville.

While a friend of mine is sharing her enthusiasm for China Miéville as she discovers Bas-Lag for the first time, I've been experiencing Miéville withdrawal. His next novel is a few months off yet, so I finally turned to Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories that I'd been saving up for just such an occasion.

Ah, it's great to read phrases like, "a bad atmosphere as tenacious as stink," and, "manipulating scobs of gris-gris," again.

A few of the stories are standouts. Namely, "Foundation," "Reports of Certain Events in London," and "Details."

They are cool and original and unsettling. I moved through them relatively slowly, partly in order to draw out the Miéville experience, but primarily to prevent overdosing on the vibe.

The story about the Ikea ball room, for example — I kept returning to it in my mind for days afterward, every time we passed Ikea (twice), every time I received or threw out an Ikea flyer (twice), every time we discussed a potential Ikea purchase, every time the kid mentioned hot dogs, whenever a colleague mentioned having recently been. This to say: the story stayed present, and I will never, ever leave a child of mine to the care of the Ikea ball room, and I want to warn all parents against it. (It turns out, that of all the people I informally polled, none have put a child in the ball room — it was too busy. It makes me wonder who actually enjoys this privilege?)

All this being the effect of a story I didn't even particularly like — the writing style felt off, it dragged a bit. Yet. It creeped me out!

You can't read too much of that kind of thing at once.

When Miéville is being straightforward with the storytelling, when it's about "regular" people in London (as opposed to "creatures" in imaginary worlds), when he's doing dialogue, he reminds me of Doris Lessing. The Londonness, the political sensibility. Banality preserved in even extraordinary circumstances.

A few other stories remind me of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's hard not to think of Danielewski when structures are imbued with qualities ordinarily reserved for animate things. "Reports of Certain Events in London," for example, uses scraps of documents to tell its story about streets that move. The alleyways, they fucking move! Also, there's a Johnny Truant–like edginess in a couple other stories (see quotation at the top of this post).

I was reminded of one other voice in particular, though it took me a while to identify. Anne Hébert. Every now and again, romanticism rears its ugly head, brought into sharp relief by the urban setting, and it made me think of Hébert's psychologically starved characters in lush surroundings, her vampires.

What you cannot know is how it hurt.

For we who are not, or were not, our bodies: we, for whom flesh is, or was, only one possible clothing. We might fly or invert ourselves through the spines of grass, we might push ourselves into other ways of being, we might be to water as water is to air, we might do anything, until you looked at yourselves. It is a pain you cannot imagine — very literally, in the most precise way, you cannot know how it is to feel yourself shoved with a mighty and brutal cosmic hand into bloody muscle. The agony of our constrained thoughts, shoehorned into those skulls you carry, stringy tendons tethering our limbs. The excruciation. Shackled in your meat vulgarity.

On the whole, these stories weren't completely satisfying. They're too long, or too short, not tight enough. The characters feel incomplete, the ideas haven't been fully thought out. For whatever reason, these short stories don't quite work for me. (Note also that one story is in graphic form, and the ebook interface in this case was not easy. Had I known, I might've opted for paper.)

I like Miéville best when he's discursive and epic, and that's only just hinted at here. He does manage to establish mood quickly and strongly. I almost wish each of them had been sustained for the length of novel.

If you worry that Miéville might be a little weird for your pedestrian tastes, this collection will give you an idea of what he's capable of. Only know that he's much, much better in long form.

Excerpt: "Looking for Jake."

It ran out of my arms and eyes like lightning

First, let me say that this is my favourite of all NYRB Classics book covers to date. The image (Susan Bower, Downhill in a Pram) is wonderfully eerie and funny and wicked all at once (kind of like the novel itself).

I'd love to recommend this book — The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer — but, honestly, I haven't the foggiest to whom. I suspect that those people who would find it engaging and relevant are also likely to find it emotionally difficult, and I'm not sure I want to wish that on anyone.

I took my time with this novel; 222 pages but it took me a couple weeks. Having reserved it for my commute (A Dance with Dragons is a bit cumbersome to be lugging about on the metro), I read it in 15-minute spurts here and there, and since I've spent several days working from home lately because of my knee injury, well, it took even longer. This book bears the distinction of having ruined my day, on at least two occasions. I'd come home fuming: I can't believe Jake, what a jerk! So it's a book that manages to spill its emotions over into real life.

We never know the narrator's name. She's on her fourth marriage and has a lot of children — we don't know how many, and Dinah's the only one of them with a name. And she wants another one.

The novel starts off on her therapist's couch, and through flashbacks and choice glimpses of her day-to-day, Mortimer touches on not only (obviously) marriage and motherhood, but also depression, (in)fidelity, sexuality, abortion, sterilization, death, fulfillment (all kinds), and the Cold War. Throw in some complicated relationships with her own parents. Oh, and the nature of happiness. Heavy stuff, but the voice is honest and witty.

Bear in mind that The Pumpkin Eater was originally published in 1962, and it still feels a bit scandalous. It reads a lot like Doris Lessing, and maybe a little bit like Sylvia Plath (but without so much hysterical exuberance).

I realized that for the first time in my life I could make love without danger. Danger? For the first time in my life I could make love. It was an amazing thought, as though I suddenly had the gift of tongues, the ability to fly. I could hardly contain my love, it ran out of my arms and eyes like lightning. "Be careful," Jake said, "You'll hurt yourself." I laughed till the tears came and it really did hurt. "You're crazy," Jake said. "What's the matter with you?" "Nothing. I love you. I've been such a fool."

This novel asks what more do people want — from marriage, from life, from other people. What more can you possible want when there isn't any more? This is it, it's all there is. Some people derive happiness from that; others...

It's said that we're born alone, and that we die alone. The fact of the matter is that ultimately, no matter how many lovers or children, or friends or parties or marriages, we also live alone, though some of us by our natures feel it more keenly than others, and some circumstances make it more keenly felt.

Reviews
– Daphne Merkin's introduction to the NYRB Classics reissue, in Slate
– NPR

I learned from Emily that this novel was made into a movie. The introduction confirms this (I tend to save these for last, as I've been burned a couple times, by if not exactly spoilers then too much information), and informs me that the screenplay was by no less than Harold Pinter. I'm betting it's worth looking up.

The smell of secession

The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner, has a couple really interesting things going for it. Namely:

1. A nose. One of the main characters works as a nose.
2. A secessionist movement.

But it turns out that this is a novel with a breast fixation. This book is all about the breasts. Large, or too small, fleshy, pillowy, ample, lactating, infected, hard, soft, sharp, droopy, pointy. We know all about the characters' breasts, and the characters' mothers' breasts, and the characters' lovers' breasts.

On the other gendered hand, we know very little about what the men look like. Apart from one male "milky torso," there is little indication whether the men are fleshy, flabby, sinewy, sculpted.

A little imbalance doesn't usually faze me. But this book is top-heavy to the point of tipping over. It's too much.

And breastfeeding. The pressure to breastfeed. The romance of breastfeeding. The bond that results from breastfeeding. And such issues. Is it OK to be breastfeeding 4-year-old girls? (Boys?) How about grown men?

Not that I'm a prude or anything. But there's a lot in this novel that made me uncomfortable. Maybe that's the point. But I don't have a good (constructive?) feeling about it.

The characters are all pretty messed up, and none of them particularly likable. They're all pretty selfish actually.

There's Scanlon, a poli sci prof specializing in mass movements and radicalism. His wife Naomi is a former professional "nose" (perfuming and such), but she posttraumatically lost her sense of smell some years ago. Baby on the way, they're moving from New York to Oregon for Scanlon's work.

Naomi's sense of smell comes back, and along with it a hormonal flood — resentments and memories and worries about (in)dependence and career fulfillment and striking a family balance and reclaiming one's body, one's self — issues not uncommon to new mothers.

They befriend a local anarchist. Angry young man. And this relationship I don't see as credible. I just don't see what Clay gets out of it, why he would stick around. Whatever. It's kind of essential to the plot that there be an anarchist, and that he be entwined within this family. So there he is.

And the leader of the secessionist movement, Sequoia, is a near-ideal, free-loving, all-giving vegan earth mother goddess. But I can't really like a character who's chosen to call herself Sequoia. Plus, in complete contrast to her usual policy of openness, she lets her past drive a wedge between her and her daughter.

Scanlon needs both these locals for his work. He tries to convince himself that he's not a bourgeois slumming it for the sake of his research, he tries to walk the talk, but really, who's he kidding?

And it all ends very badly, making me think much the worse of all the characters.

Somewhere in its heart this book is about leaving a life behind, running away from your past, it catching you up even while you yearn for it, ambling toward a life you think you're supposed to be living. Maybe outrunning your past, or just forgetting it.

Somewhere toward the end, the book purports to be about love, the bonds of family, and betrayals thereof. But there's very little real love here. Maybe that's the point. But I can't shake the feeling that this book was written by a man with a superficial grasp of what love is, who just plain doesn't understand women. It makes me angry, and sad. Maybe that's the point.

I'm reminded a little of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, for the street-level view of a movement, the day-to-day practicalities that weigh the lofty ideals back down to earth. Also, Annette Gilson's New Light, for it's Americanness, for putting the commune back in community.

It's also a very olfactory book, though it's neither Proust nor Süskind; only when the smells of fear and danger crop up, I'm afraid the nose has some rehabilitation to go before her alleged genius specificity fully returns.

So, there's some pretty heady stuff in here, but it didn't come together for me. I may or may not pick up Keith Scribner's next novel, depending on its subject matter. I'm sure he'll be fine; his wife must have quite the rack.

A girl and her cat

"No one has any idea, do they, until they have children, what it means. It's all I can do just to keep up with the rush of things, the meals one after another, the food, let alone giving the children the attention they should have. I know that Emily is ready for more than I have time to give her, but she is such a demanding child, so difficult, she always has taken a lot out of me, she want wants to be read to and played with all the time, but I'm cooking, I'm ordering food, I'm at it all day, well you know how it is, there isn't time for what there has to be done, I simply don't have time for the child. I did manage to get a girl for a time last year, but that was really more trouble than it was worth, really, all their problems and their crises and you have to deal with them, she took up as much of my time as Emily does, but I did get an hour to myself after lunch and I put my feet up for a bit, but I did not find I had the energy to read, let alone study, no one knows how it is, what it means, no, children do for you, they do you in, I'm not what I was, I know that only too well I am afraid."

The child on her knee, two or three years old, a heavy passive child dressed in white wool that smelled damp, was being jogged faster now; his eyes were glazing as the world bounced up and down around him, his adenoidal mouth was open and slack, the full cheeks quivering.

The husband, passive but really tense with irritation — with guilt — smoked on, listening, frowning.

"But what can you give out when you get nothing in? I am empty, drained; I am exhausted by lunchtime and all I want is to sleep by then. And when you think of what I used to be, what I was capable of! I never thought of being tired, I never imagined I could become the sort of woman who would never have time to open a book. But there it is."

She sighed, quite unselfconsciously. She was like a child, that tall, solid, confident woman; she needed understanding as a child does. She sat looking inward into the demands of her days and her nights. No one else was there for her, because she felt she was talking to herself: they could not hear, or would not. She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for — what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way.

— from The Memoirs of a Survivor, by Doris Lessing.

This is a very weird little book. The Memoirs of a Survivor is described as a dystopia, and by Doris Lessing herself as "an attempt at autobiography." It reads like part fairy tale, part tract, a report from another time and place, not quite like a confessional diary as one might expect from the title.

It is never entirely clear what it is that's being survived, or who is surviving it. There's the girl, Emily, and the woman, the narrator, on whose doorstep she turned up, charged with being responsible for her. And Emily's cat.

While it's the girl who thrives in the outside world, the anarchic, back-to-basics conditions where she establishes herself as a kind of leader (or, at least, a leader's girlfriend), it's clearly the woman who's a survivor of Emily's puberty, teenage years, sexual awakening.

The girl and the woman are incomprehensible to each other, yet also the same. They're at a bit of a standoff. The narrator very sagely recognizes that we too were once children, once young and in love. Yet it's somewhat unsettling, however reasonable, for her to stand back, so detached, and watch Emily grow up, let her grow up all by herself.

Meanwhile, there's the world falling apart outside, we know not why, and the walls of the woman's apartment melting away to show her other realities, past and future. (We know Emily's mother, as excerpted above, only through these glimpses through the wall.)

If you've never read Doris Lessing, I don't recommend this novel as an introduction to her. But even though this novel is kind of all over the place, there are some lovely thought-provoking bits, about children, about growing up, gender politics, etc.

New York Times review, 1975.

I almost think this book's really about the bond between a girl and her cat. Which makes for a pretty remarkable story, really. (I say this as someone who has lately enjoyed a good deal of quality time with her cat; it feels like she's finally chosen me to be hers — we have an understanding, she and I.)

That strange mathematical point of endlessness

So I've finished reading Graham Greene's The End of Affair, and it's not at all what I expected. This guy sets about sabotaging his relatively long-term relationship with this married woman, and the affair ends, and we spend much of the book wondering how and why it ends, and the guy sure doesn't have a clue about the why, and years later he's still a bit upset about it, but the book's not even really about that. It's about her, developing a relationship with God.

There are some pretty complex human dynamics at work here, and Greene put them to paper seemingly effortlessly. "The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness," he writes (and I think Tolstoy would agree — that's where the story lies). The narrator is dripping with anger, hate, frustration, confusion, spitefulness, pride (masquerading as indifference), and, yes, even love (on occasion appearing as lustfulness) — everything but happiness.

I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, "I've never loved anybody or anything as I do you." It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement — we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter — all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

She wasn't lying even when she said, "Nobody else. Ever again." There are contradictions in time, that's all, that don't exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had — I couldn't bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn't forget and I couldn't not fear.

The narrator, Bendrix, is, for the most part, a spiteful little shit. It's odd that he should invoke Sarah's capacity for love here — he spends so much energy on denying it, disbelieving it, and trying to disprove it. But he recognizes it. It's this capacity and this being outside time that, if they don't make her saintly, bring her closer to God.

What is love, anyway? Does Sarah make her sacrifice out of love? Or is it fear? Her keeping her contract with God — is that for love of God, or love of Bendrix, or indifference toward Bendrix? Is it selfish or selfless?

Who's the hero then? Bendrix is nasty and petty — not exactly sympathetic — hardly the makings of a hero. Or is it him after all, for raging on? Certainly not the cuckold Henry. The rationalist? But he fails in his argument against God, creates a convert even. Could it be Sarah, slut turned saint? (Apart from acknowledging that she's been a bitch and a fake, I'm not convinced that she's evolved much as a person.) Perhaps it's God Himself, having the last laugh on the lot of them, for all they would lose in His name, whether willingly sacrificed or not of their own agency.

Maybe it's simply that religion makes me uncomfortable. Maybe that's why I find this to be an excruciatingly painful and difficult little book. And it boggles me (as it does Bendrix) that someone could love God more than a flesh-and-blood person.

On a side note, Emily in writing about St Augustine's Confessions called out that "he depicts his relationship with God in language modern readers will recognize from the subsequent literature of erotically-charged romance." I immediately recognized that something similar is at play in Sarah's diary entries. Greene even reinforces this: "The words of human love have been used by saints to describe their vision of God."

There's some compelling writing in this book, capturing perfectly the underlying tensions in a run-of-the-mill conversation.

Halfway through, I'm thinking, he reminds me of someone, the way he does that, the way a banal conversation explodes with meaning. Some may think it blasphemous of me to say, but: Doris Lessing. (By some, I mean Maud Newton, who, if I've got it right, loves Greene and hates Lessing.) I'm thinking specifically of Lessing's short stories, and The Golden Notebook. Not sure this quality is so present in her other novels.

Anyway, the narrator is a writer, and it's hard to know how much is fiction and how much is Greene himself. The novel is, after all, allegedly based on a real-life affair. He writes in the morning ("A love affair had to begin after lunch"), setting himself a daily quota. Most of the work of writing is done in the subconscious. "So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days," so that the unconscious is freed up to work out the problems of the fiction. Stories aren't invented, they're "remembered"; but they still require intense research.

It seems that Greene himself was ambivalent toward this novel. It is raw and weird, but, to my mind, this perhaps heightens its power and may offer more authenticity than a "well-crafted" piece.

From a 1951 New York Times review:

His juxtapositions of love and hate, envy and admiration form the high level of his drama and are reinforced by the stylistic contrasts of the characters and scenes which give them flesh. When we come to his shifty money-changers, private investigators and race-track touts, Government officials and garden-party ladies we hear the tape recorder at its accurate work. In "The End of the Affair" the splendidly stupid private detective, Alfred Parkis, and his apprentice son, and the maudlin grifter who is the heroine's mother, equal the best of the seedy supernumeraries of his other novels. It is savage and sad, vulgar and ideal, coarse and refined, and a rather accurate image of an era of cunning and glory, of cowardice and heroism, of belief and unbelief.

Read this book before you die.

The first time it had ever been thought

And each vast shapeless Thing had two little eyes, just like the tiny eyes of the old Clefts there, lost in the loose flesh of their faces, old Clefts sprawling and dozing on the warm rocks, and the thought in both girls' minds now, and perhaps it was the first time it had ever been thought in that long-ago time such ages ago, came: "I don't want to be like them" . . . the idea that had made revolutions, wars, split families, or driven the bearer of the idea mad or into new active life . . . "I won't be like them, I won't."

— from The Cleft, by Doris Lessing.

The story so far

I've been reading. I've been lost in my reading — in good ways and in bad.

It started with The Savage Detectives. I started it over the Christmas break, and it was my little oasis of poetry, to shut the world off — the family, the noise — for a few minutes a day and immerse myself in a book.

So I loved the start of it, wanted to know more of the visceral realist movement in Mexico. Then it got weird. The second section of the book, called "The Savage Detectives," consists of the journal entries of a varied cross-section of people, recalling certain events, or nonevents, in which the new visceral realists we'd come to know in the first section played peripheral roles. Then I felt lost. I was somewhat startled to find myself dislocated in space and time, over and over again. (Who are the detectives here anyway? And what's so savage about them?) Then I gave myself over to it.

But the whole time I'm thinking: How did someone manage to craft a novel out of all this? Is it really a novel? And do I really like it?

These tiny windows onto these poets who passed through random people's lives. This interests me, as a technique, as well as in life, because, well, how much do we know anyone really? The size of the window varies, but even to live with someone for years, sharing nights and days, whole and endless, is there ever complete entry into their inner life?

This, then, is how one writes? Find a window, open it wider, wider. And when it doesn't open any further, find another window?

"One day I drank five Coca-Colas and suddenly I felt sick, as if the sun had filtered down into my Cokes and I'd drunk it without realizing." This is a magical sentence. I've read it over countless times. I still don't get it. Sick — like the sun would poison your drink; drinking the sun would poison you. And that doesn't seem quite right, it's not the glass of Florida sunshine we down at breakfast. But then it's not the Florida sun, is it? And I remember seeing the desert shimmer in the south of Tunisia, the sad little zoo with the trick camel that drank water from a Coke bottle; I remember The Sheltering Sky and I remember Under the Volcano, and pretty much the only thing I remember about the both of them is the feeling of heat, the exhaustion of it, like drinking a poison sun. It's a plain little sentence, but I love it.

Excerpts:
Stars like holographic projections
Two islands

Then I started the seahorse book (so called by Helena for the illustration on its cover): Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson. I started by loving it. So much the opposite of Bolaño, so spare; poetic with a delicate poignancy of observation. Not Bolaño's rapturous flood of images and emotions.

Bolaño is the poetry of excess. Winterson is a negative; it's what's left after all excess is removed. I don't know how to substantiate this. It's a feeling. Visceral. There is a time for Winterson's stillness. And I needed to be stilled, a little, in my reading. But I get a rush from the bombardment Bolaño levels at me. Makes me feel alive. Winterson leaves me feeling longing, empty. Bolaño may tear out my innards, but at least I see the innards, know what and where they are, as I gather it all up into myself again. It's something visceral.

Lighthousekeeping starts in a fairytale haze, through which eternal truths seem to shine. How does she write this thing? Few words, but all, I'm sure, carefully chosen.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn't know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked the sausage in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausage with darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste. That's what we ate: sausages and darkness.

And there was talk of story, without all that much story actually being divulged. Wherever a story starts, one could always go back a little further, to an earlier beginning, just as stories always go on well after the ending. How can you tell a story these days without acknowledging this? And it all made a calm and rational sense to me.

Then it got weird. Suddenly the fairy tale was gone and we were in modern times trying to make it sound like a fairy tale, all cryptic proclamations of love, all airy-fairy. And she lost me.

But all the same, I wonder. How did she write this, these disparate tableaux laid on top of each other to make something called a novel?

I noted an obvious debt to Doris Lessing:

The doctor leaned back in his chair. "Do you keep a diary?"

"I have a collection of silver notebooks."

"Are they consistent?"

"Yes. I buy them from the same department store."

"I mean, do you keep on record or your life, or several? Do you feel you have more than one life perhaps?"

"Of course I do. It would be impossible to tell one single story."

"Perhaps you should try."

"A beginning, a middle, and an end?"

"Something like that — yes."

Then something more visceral (though, somehow, fairly emotionlessly told):

My heart is a muscle with four valves. It beats 101,000 times a day, it pumps eight pints of blood around my body. Science can bypass it, but I can't. I say I give it to you, but I never do.

...reminding me of "How I Finally Lost My Heart."

Then I read more Doris Lessing: On Cats. It's light, and deft, and it's about cats, wonderful cats! This is not a fluffy, sentimental book. This is about weird creatures with secret lives. And I wonder how she does it, there's no particular way about her, or her words; it's all done without pretension, straight up. She just has the most interesting things to say.

Now, at the end of January, in the deep of winter, I am reading The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, and I wish I could stay in bed all day reading. I've been suspicious of this book; overhyped, I thought. But on impulse I dragged it out of the bargain bin the other day, and I haven't been able to put it down since. It feels old-fashioned (and I don't know what that means); traditional: extolling the beginning-middle-end that Winterson denies. It is comfortable, if slightly (deliciously) eery, and makes me want to stay still and lost and blanketed till it's done.

And this is how I'm learning to write. Reading has always been a window onto another world, but now I'm seeing that writing is too. I see so many windows these days — in the metro, in my coworkers' phone conversations, in other internet lives. Some days there is even time enough to peer through them. It's not a matter of escape, but simply of seeing something else, something outside myself. (If I've learned anything this last year it's to allow myself to be lifted out of myself, to be lifted, to lift myself.) To shape a novel is to find where the views through various windows intersect.

After a certain age

[...] Anyway, somewhere back there, a very small girl had fought for and won a cat who kept her days and nights company; and then she lost it.

After a certain age — and for some of us that can be very young — there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before, they appeared before, masked differently, wearing different clothes, another nationality, another colour; but the same, the same, and everything is an echo and a repetition; and there is no grief even that it is not a recurrence of something long out of memory that expresses itself in unbelievable anguish, days of tears, loneliness, knowledge of betrayal and all for a small, thin, dying cat.

— from On Cats, by Doris Lessing.

Closing Lessing

I finished it, by the way, the other week. All 34 stories (a couple of them called novellas) in 655 pages. Brilliant.

I almost wish there were more. I mean, I know there are more out there, but, I mean, at hand. But not really, because it was emotionally exhausting.

Here are some highlights:
How I Finally Lost My Heart
Our Friend Judith
Dialogue

And how I came to this book in the first place.

I realize now that most of these stories are fairly depressing. The problems of class, the meaninglessness of political life, the common plight of dutiful women. But oh so gut-wrenchingly real. Grappling with identity through it all.

If The Golden Notebook still scares you, even with all the fascinating commentary it provokes, ease into Lessing by reading her Stories.

What's the joke?

A bus nosed to a standstill; half a dozen people got off; a man passed and said: "What's the joke?" He winked, and she realised she had been smiling.

Well-being, created because of the small familiar busyness of the street, filled her. Which was of course why she had spent so long, an hour now, loitering around the foot of the tall building. This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thin drift of cloud across pale blue sky, she checked, or rather tested, by a deliberate use of the other vision on the scene: the man behind the neat arrangements of coloured vegetables had a stupid face, he looked brutal; the future of the adolescents holding their position outside the music-shop door against the current of pressing people could only too easily be guessed at by the sharply aggressive yet forlorn postures of shoulders and loins; Ada, whichever way you looked at her, was hideous, repulsive, with her loose yellowing flesh and her sour-sweat smell. Et cetera, et cetera. Oh yes, et cetera, on theses lines, indefinitely, if she chose to look. Squalid, ugly, pathetic . . . And what of it? insisted her blood, for even now she was smiling, while she kept the other vision sharp as knowledge. She could feel the smile on her face. Because of it, people going past would offer jokes, comments, stop to talk, invite her for drinks or coffee, flirt, tell her the stories of their lives. She was forty this year, and her serenity was a fairly recent achievement. Wrong word: it had not been tried for; but it seemed as if years of pretty violent emotion, one way or another, had gelled or shaken into a joy which welled up from inside her independent of the temporary reactions — pain, disappointment, loss — for it was stronger than they. Well, would it continue? Why should it? it might very well vanish again, without explanation, as it had come. Possibly this was a room in her life; she had walked into it, found it furnished with joy and well-being, and would walk through and out again into another room, still unknown and unimagined. She had certainly never imagined this one, which was a gift from Nature? Chance? Excess? . . . A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly she looked at the word "love", which her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen, and said to herself: Now it's enough, it's time for me to go in.

— from "Dialogue," in Stories, by Doris Lessing.

Do you know this feeling? I've been living it for months. There are days I think I must be going crazy. This sense of well-being — it's completely unreasonable. I can't say it has anything to do with love, exactly, but the same could be said of this story's nameless protagonist.

(A few weeks back, a woman caught my attention in the metro. She was smiling, near laughing, to herself. A happy relief from the usual blank stares of the daily commute, but also unsettling, unnatural. I realized that most days I'm just like her.)

How reassuring to find someone who knows exactly how I feel, even though she be a figment of Doris Lessing's imagination.

I am swimming through this collection of stories, and indeed, each next one is better than the last.

(Have you read "To Room Nineteen"? Oh, my god!)

The Golden Notebook Project is under way, by the way, and though I won't be reading along, I do intend to follow the commentary.

Go read some Doris Lessing.

One surely ought to stay in character

More stories. I can't get enough of these stories. Just one more, I think, before I return to some of the weightier tomes I have on hand, but just one more leads to another, and then another. And each next one is my new favourite.

Doris Lessing is amazing! Clever, but not too clever. Simple and very complicated at the same time. Real, very real, yet that stark reality is expressed and framed in imaginative ways.

Here's another snippet that struck me:

A mutual friend, Betty, had been given a cast-off Dior dress. She was too short for it. Also she said: "It's not a dress for a married woman with three children and a talent for cooking. I don't know why not, but it isn't." Judith was the right build. Therefore one evening the three of us met by appointment in Judith's bedroom, with the dress. Neither Betty nor I was surprised at the renewed discovery that Judith was beautiful. We had both often caught each other, and ourselves, in moments of envy when Judith's calm and severe face, her undemonstratively perfect body, succeeded in making everyone else in a room or a street look cheap.

Judith is tall, small-breasted, slender. Her light brown hair is parted in the centre and cut straight around her neck. A high straight forehead, straight nose, a full grave mouth are setting for her eyes, which are green, large and prominent. Her lids are very white, fringed with gold, and moulded close over the eyeball, so that in profile she has the look of a staring gilded mask. The dress was of dark green glistening stuff, cut straight, with a sort of loose tunic. It opened simply at the throat. In it Judith could of course evoke nothing but classical images. Diana, perhaps, back from the hunt, in a relaxed moment? A rather intellectual wood nymph who had opted for an afternoon in the British Museum Reading Room? Something like that. Neither Betty nor I said a word, since Judith was examining herself in a long mirror, and must know she looked magnificent.

Slowly she drew off the dress and laid it aside. Slowly she put on the old cord skirt and woollen blouse she had taken off. She must have surprised a resigned glance between us, for she then remarked, with the smallest of mocking smiles: "One surely ought to stay in character, wouldn't you say?" She added, reading the words out of some invisible book, written not by her, since it was a very vulgar book, but perhaps by one of us: "It does everything for me, I must admit."

"After seeing you in it," Betty cried out, defying her, "I can't bear for anyone else to have it. I shall simply put it away." Judith shrugged, rather irritated. In the shapeless skirt and blouse, and without make-up, she stood smiling at us, a woman at whom forty-nine out of fifty people would not look twice.

— from "Our Friend Judith," in Stories, by Doris Lessing.

The Golden Notebook Project starts November 10, an experiment in close reading, from The Institute for the Future of the Book. It's not so long ago (3 years?) that I read The Golden Notebook for the first time myself. In its way, it was the subject of my own experiment in close reading, and quite apart from the power of its content, The Golden Notebook changed the way I read.

(It also has the distinction of being one of only two books not properly shelved or stacked, sitting in my desk drawer, unless you call that an organizational class of its own, because it's still waiting for me to deal with it.)

Barack Obama lists it among books significant to him. Surely he is staying in character to say so. (What does that say about the man? That he's a feminist? He understands what it is to have a romanticized vision of a political life? That he understands what it is to compartmentalize the facets of one's being, to be fragmented, and sees the necessity, and the way, of consolidating the whole?)

Many people are daunted by the novel's reputation. I was. But it's brilliant.

Read it when you're ready for it. In the meantime, I heartily recommend Doris Lessing's Stories.

Simpling and sapping

It suddenly occurred to me that I was looking at the whole phenomenon quite inaccurately. My (or perhaps I am permitted to say our?) way of looking at it is that one must search for an A, or a B, or a C or a D with a certain combination of desirable or sympathetic qualities so that one may click, or spontaneously combust: or to put it differently, one needs a person who, like a saucer of water, allows one to float off on him/her, like a transfer. But this wasn't so at all. Actually one carries with one a sort of burning spear stuck in one's side, that one waits for someone else to pull out; it is something painful, like a sore or a wound, that one cannot wait to share with someone else.

I saw myself quite plainly in a moment of truth: I was standing at a window (on the third floor) with A and B (to mention only the mountain peaks of my emotional experience) behind me, a rather attractive woman, if I may say so, with a mellowness that I would be the first to admit is the sad harbinger of age, but is attractive by definition, because it is a testament to the amount of sampling and sipping (I nearly wrote 'simpling' and 'sapping') I have done in my time . . . There I stood, brushed, dressed, red-lipped, kohl-eyed, all waiting for an evening with a possible C. And at another window overlooking (I think I am right in saying) Margaret Street, stood C, brushed, washed, shaved, smiling: an attractive man (I think), and he was thinking: Perhaps she will turn out to be D (or A or 3 or ? or %, or whatever symbol he used). We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's face like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: 'Take my wound.' Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's own.

— from "How I Finally Lost My Heart," in Stories, by Doris Lessing.

Story after story

For someone who claims not to be a big fan of short stories, I sure have read a lot of them lately. These collections since mid-August:

Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families
David Foster Wallace: Oblivion
Daniel Handler: Adverbs
Sana Krasikov: One More Year
Théophile Gautier: My Fantoms

I have found that short stories make for excellent reading:
— while waiting for my morning coffee
— in the bathroom
— on the morning métro commute
— at lunch
— whenever I need a break from my workday
— on the evening métro commute
— while watching the stove
— while the girl splashes in her bath
— while pretending to watch hockey
— at bedtime

Short stories provide a kind of instant gratification that I seem to be craving lately. Certainly I needed these bursts to balance some of my other long and slow reading. They're easy enough to start — and finish! — in the interstices of plodding days.

Currently, I'm midway through Dumas's The Last Cavalier, but earlier this week, reading in an overcrowded train about plots to assassinate Napoleon, I suddenly felt both lost and under siege. So I set it aside, to wait for the smoke to clear. And I turned to Doris Lessing's Stories.

I love the feel of this book — its physical presence. It's new in the catalogue of Everyman's Library. I have a couple other books of this imprint, and they're a real pleasure to read and to carry. If you didn't know:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The Everyman's hardcover has peculiar, but perfect, dimensions. Weighty, but somehow in its compactness perfectly weighted. It just feels good!

So I'm reading Doris Lessing again. I've never felt compelled to search out and read in its entirety her oeuvre, and I'm starting to wonder why not. I've immensely enjoyed everything of hers that I've read, and while I truly to believe her work to be Important, my interest in it has been very reasonable — I have not obsessively hunted down obscure or out-of-print works, nor have I compulsively snapped up her latest releases. When I read her, I am pleasantly surprised and reassured to find that it is good. And I am fortunate to have this leisurely but strong relationship with an author, relieved that it is unlikely I will run out her books to read for many years yet to come.

In 1969, Doris Lessing was written about in Time Magazine:

Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way as people once talked about the Hemingway Man. The Lessing Woman is a formidable female. She hasn't been to a university but she has read everything and remembers it. Her ideals are high and unsullied. She works (or has worked) at lost political causes. Although she loathes marriage, she gamely raises children and endures domestic woes. She cooks well, keeps a spotless house (except when depressed) and does excellent writing, research or secretarial work. She is any man's moral and intellectual superior, and she rarely hesitates to tell him so.

I can't say I've ever heard anyone called a Lessing Woman, though I know a few. I don't think I qualify myself — I'm less political, more naturally maternal, and my house is far from spotless. But there are days I think it's something to aspire to.

The stories were drawn from collections previously published in 1957, 1963, and 1972. They are bleak, in quite a beautiful way, and very real.

Here's one Doris Lessing story (not in the collection I'm reading) I found online: "A Mild Attack of Locusts."

I'll share more about the stories in this particular collection as I progress.

Links

...to reviews, in which other people have more interesting things to say than I do, and that should:
1. Convince me at long last to start reading Dumas's long-lost masterpiece,
2. Convince you to read Patrick Hamilton, and
3. Convince some doubters that Doris lessing is fully deserving of the Nobel Prize.

Dumas
A review of The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas, which is ready and waiting for me (What am I waiting for? — it's Dumas! Hurrah!):

Dumas, as Tolstoy said, was a 'novelising historian' rather than a historical novelist. He knew that fiction flourished in the margins of history, which is confined to obtuse and incorrigible facts; the novel specialises in the scrutiny of private lives, not public affairs.

Hamilton
Francine Prose gives a rundown of the intense and squalid Patrick Hamilton:

His ambivalence about his characters is frequently extreme; it's hard to think of another writer who so thoroughly despises the weaknesses of the very same men and women he so desperately and compassionately longs to save from themselves.

At times his view of humanity seems positively Manichaean. Half his characters are consumed by shame and regret while the other half feed on the tender, foolish emotions of the first half. He allows his characters to descend to a level of degradation so low that you might assume they'd hit bottom unless you'd read enough of Hamilton's work to expect them to sink further as they anguish over every major slight and minor decision.

Lessing
One review of Alfred and Emily, by Doris Lessing:

Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book of two halves — the first section is a novelist's game of might-have-beens: Lessing removes all the frustrations that circumscribed her growing up in Rhodesia, and gives Alfred and Emily the lives they wanted for themselves. The second section is another honest excavation of the lives they were all actually dealt. The gap is the one in which the writer has always lived.

And another:

But whenever she drifts too far from the subject, she returns to her two main themes: the eternal war between mothers and daughters, and the vital importance of women going out to work rather than suffocating at home.