The Geography of the Imagination

Last week I was shown a series of plans for novels by Arvon students. Discussion of such plans are useful but a plan - or (dread) a synopsis - is only a way of thinking about the novel. It is not the novel itself. A plan is as like the intended novel as a map of France is to France itself - it is like, but not like.

This isn't to dismiss the usefulness of planning. Maps are very useful: we get lost without them, errors in them cause neighbourly disputes, wars even - but to put their usefulness into perspective.

This week, the analogy came back to me while reading a posthumous collection of Michael Donaghy's prose - a benign and only seemingly quirky series of reflections on poetry - I came across his account of work with a number of deaf poets who, introducing their craft, gave him a photocopy of a poem by the American deaf poet, Clayton Valli.

He found himself 'acutely embarrassed by the apparent mediocrity of the work' until he was shown a video of Valli performing the piece.

Donaghy realised that it was:

...a clear example of Frost's dictum 'poetry is what's lost in translation,' for this performance was the poem. the photocopied sheet on my lap was no more a work of literary art than a choreographer's stage direction can be said to constitute a ballet or pediscript a pavane.'

It was so in the same way that a clock is merely a diagram of time, a means of measuring and representing it and yet so different from time as we experience it, or that these ice dance charts:


resemble this:

Donaghy quotes R G Collingwood who called dance 'the mother of language':

We get still farther away from the fundamental facts of speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, where tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored... the written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of byzantine music

Neumes, Donaghy explains, are the little strokes indicating pitch and ornament accompanying the chats in ancient missals that gradually modify into musical notation that we use today.


Donaghy's point, to simplify, is that the poem exists to provoke its real life in the reader's mind - the (successful) poem, on paper, is as like in the reader's head as a a map of France is to France itself.

It is my point, too. The book exists to provoke a world inside the reader's head. And even for the writer this is true. The book as it comes into being is only a shadow - a map - of what it feels like in the writer's head.

Roland Barthes: Journal de deuil

Barthes' Journal de deuil (Bereavement Diary) and Carnets du voyage en Chine (China Travel Notebook) have recently been published in France.

Benjamin Ivry gives an even-tempered account of the history, controversy and people surrounding the publication of these two posthumous works in The Chronicle Review, but I'm reading the first book at the moment, and grief seems to be a recent theme here.

There's a line in Barthes' Bereavement Diary, that the measure of grief, according to the encyclopaedia, Memento Larousse, is eighteen months for a parent. The context and the bald giving of this fact suggests Barthes finds this measure unlikely - although it is among the earliest entries, which runs from 26 October, 1977, to 15 September, 1979. I am reading the book slowly so perhaps Larousse will be proved right. Unlikely though, isn't it?

I'm reading the book for several reasons.

Long, long before I taught within a university and, so, ignorant of Critical Theory and its impact, I read Barthes for the thrill of reading him: the quick notations, the spry insights, the world considered as other than it was conventionally perceived. I read The Lover's Discourse, Camera Lucida, and Roland Barthes, not fully aware that a system - a whole Theory indeed - had been made from them. I read them as I read Yeats or Blake, aware that some greater cosmology was being suggested but one that seemed, also, independent of the work and its immediate impact on me.

I am reading Journal de Deuil because I like reading him - he seems like one of those authors that, as Holden Caulfield suggested, you might want to ring up after you have been reading him. And I especially like the works that take the form of a notebook.

I like reading notebooks. Writers' notebooks especially. Susan Sontag, writing on Elias Canetti, described the notebook as 'the perfect literary form for an eternal student. . . . The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world.” That self, thought Sontag was one 'incapable of insipidity or satiety... a mind always reacting, registering shocks and trying to outwit them.' That seems a perfect description of Barthes use of the form, too.

The second reason - cf The Thought-Fox below - was I thought it would help my French along. The only thing I really enjoyed about French in school was translating it back into English: we never had to do it the other way, just as we seldom used the 'tu' form. It was never expected that we would actually speak to French people except to ask directions or to be served in shops.

And, despite its subject, the book looks affable. Some 270 pages long, it is mostly white space. Each entry, and few of them are long, is given a page. A friend, the intellectually glamourous Georges-Claude Guilbert, said he read it in a sitting - or a standing - in a bookshop in twenty minutes. I wont manage it at that speed.

Another reason is that le deuil is one of my favourite words in French - or rather a favourite sound - as in feuille and acceuil. It's one of the few French sounds with which I feel confident after I learned to say it by imagining a yo-yo in my throat: deuil-euil-euil-euil!

Hill and Wang, FSG in New York have acquired the English Language rights, and a translation is due soon.

In the meantime, I'd translate the title as Diary of Grief, which might sound stiff, but it also sounds starker - 'bereavement' seems too light and lightening a word - and 'diary' (although it shouldn't) sounds to my dim English ears much more of a daily account than 'journal' and, so far as I have read, the very burden of time - of what death does to time, what time does does to the dead - seems one of its most prominent themes.

The Stations of the Cross

After reading an article in The Times on Friday, 10 April, by Eamon Duffy, I realised that making the 14 Stations of the Cross on Good Friday was, if not my first experience of narrative, my first experience of a narrative that was structured.

The key points of the drama are outlined, characters purposefully introduced and despatched, the action rising to a pitch - the three falls under the cross punctuating the narrative - and its melancholy finish is deceptive and writerly: the resurrection can go undepicted: it is the story's true, unspoken and bright conclusion.

An old Jesuit dean, the parish priest, would lead the congregation from Station to Station. There were set prayers, possibly set hymns, and, at each one, he would evoke the human drama of each scene. Detailed and imaginative, his intent was to animate each scene, not make it relevant, but to make it real. In this intent, he seems a figure of a very distant past. Whenever I read or reread Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, I can imagine him moving amongst its pages.

A tiny figure, white-haired, hunched, a strong croak in his voice, he was, simultaneously, a benign and frightening presence to me precisely because his own passion for The Passion was so deep and physical: I remember sermons he gave in which he would bang his head with his fist, call out across the church, stretch his arms wide in exaltation or humility. I have never met a priest his like again. All others since have seemed lukewarm and desirous to please, even when objectionable.

In the church I knew as a child, the Stations of the Cross were representational scenes done in a Georgian mode. The Times article which made me remember them came illustrated with the Eric Gill woodcuts that are the basis for the bas -reliefs in Westminster Cathedral. I like Gill - and woodcuts generally - but the woodcuts don't seem to be strongly pious, but the sharp lines, deep blacks and white spaces make for drama, and while the other figures seem stiff and curiously uninvolved by what they witness, the Christ figure is movingly done, growing progressively limper as the story reaches its climax: his drooping body in death and at the deposition is particularly affecting.

Below are the woodcuts or you can see them as slides here

Ted Hughes The Thought Fox/La Pensée Renarde

Illustration by Jon Harris

Away in France for some weeks, the last news of England I had was of the death of Nicholas Hughes and the tired revisiting of 'the curse of Sylvia Plath.' I'd rather think of Nicholas Hughes as the recipient of the some of the finest letters from his father. They are the ones in the Selected Letters I find most moving and illuminating.

In these letters, Ted Hughes' account of himself seems to verge on the Shakespearean - imagine a Romeo who did not die with Juliet, but who went on living, dogged by scandal, a divisive figure still, a Romeo who loved again not always wisely, not always well, a Romeo who grow up, grow old, who pursued a fallible but as honest a life as he could manage and then, finally mortal, this ancient Romeo, like Lear, realises 'I have taken too little care of this' and revisits and finally possesses the grief he may have evaded but that was also stolen from him.

The grief is there - owned and owned up to - in the final works and in those letters to his son. I think, to be the recipient of such letters, the son must have been a significant man himself, not just a patient ear but an attentive and responsive ear. You do not write such letters to someone who cannot equal them.

I wondered if Hughes' poetry had much impact in France, but it seems not. There is Joanny Moulin's Ted Hughes: la langue remunerée, which discusses the work in French but presents the poetry in English; Moulin also translates some of Hughes' poetry for l'Anthologie bilingue de la poésie anglaise (Pléiade), but I couldnt find this or any other translation.

I had an idea that Hughes would translate well in French - particularly the later work - and I wanted to improve my French - it needs it. I thought, in the manner of a crossword puzzle, I could while away an hour or two each evening by flicking through the dictionary, and it was also something I could ask the staff and students I was working with: eg how to replace Hughes marvellous monolyllabic '...that now'and again now, and now, and now...' and avoid the use of 'maintenant'.


What follows is my translation, with errors and infelicities in abundance, sans doute. There were often comments along the way which went, 'You can't do that in French,' but sometimes, it became clear, Hughes does things one 'can't do' in English, such as the long sentence that straddles the majority of the poem - particularly stanzas 3-6 with its shifts in subjects and from plural to singular, but it's these very shifts that creates the poem's wary sideways creep that leads to poem's strong conclusion.

Indeed, even its title, The Thought-Fox takes two nouns and uses one of them as an adjective in a way that would look clumsy in another context.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

La Pensée Renarde

Je m’imagine cette forêt du moment de minuit:
quelquechose d’autre est vivant
à coté de la solitude de la pendule
et cette page blanche où mes doigts se placent.

Vers la fenêtre je ne vois aucune étoile:
quelquechose plus près
mais plus profound de dedans l’obscurité
entre dans la solitude.

Froide, délicatement comme la neige foncée,
une truffe de renarde touche brindille, feuille;
deux yeux accompagnent un mouvement
qui là et puis là, et là, et là

laisse des impreintes nettes dans la neige
entres les arbres, et prudentement une ombre
boiteuse reste en arrière près d’un moignon d’arbre creaux,
ombre d’un corps hardi à venir

à travers des clarières; un oeil,
une verdeur d’elargisssement et ‘d’approfondissement;
brilliante, concentrée, elle s’occupe de son affaires

jusqu’a ce qu'avec une puanteur renarde, soudain, âcre, chaude,
elle entre dans la trou foncé de la tête.
La fenêtre est encore sans étoiles; la pendule tic-tac;
la page est imprimée.

Flannery O'Connor

Picking up Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor, you wonder how he will fill the pages: dead at 39, an adulthood that was confined and constrained by illness, no long list of lovers, no involvement in world-changing events, O’Connor’s fiction is clearly more eventful and sensational than her life -but the book is well worth the reading, and not just because it causes one to brood on O’Connor’s fiction, and her uncompromising vision - how was the one achieved, and the other acquired?

I prefer biographies written by those with a self-reflected interest in the concerns and reputations of their subject – VS Pritchett on Chekhov, say, or Chesterton and Ackroyd (for good and ill) on Dickens - books where one gets a sense of a fretful and engaged musing on the writer as well the 'shilling life' that 'gives you all the facts.'

I like best those little tomes they used to be called ‘Lives’: Weidenfeld and Nicolson resurrect the genre from time to time, matching writers with subjects. The best of these biographies reflect back upon the biographer so that Proust, for example, becomes a proto-Edmund White and James Joyce is feminised by Edna O’Brien’s fond regard.

At first, you expect Gooch's book to be like so many contemporary biographies – the thoroughness of the research stalling the pace, the narrative halted again and again by a roll call of dates, banal events and a labyrinthine account of the many branches of the family tree. Gooch's biography is along these lines, and you don’t get a sense of a strong identification with the subject. You do get a sense of a definite liking, but not any evidence that what pre-occupies O’Connor also engages Gooch in any way that encourages him to explain or investigate his subject deeply - in the way Woolf evidently occupies Hermione Lee or the way Andrew Wilson digs so deeply into Patricia Highsmith's work in Beautiful Shadow - a stunning book that excavates the writer's mind.

Gooch only really approaches anything like a dissection of how O'Connor's faith informs and determines her work towards the end when she welcomes the influence of Teilhard de Chardin, at that time a maverick theologian and, in the book, the only instance where she departs from the Church’s teaching.



This is a lack. O’Connor, by her own estimation, is a Catholic writer before she is a female writer or a Southern American writer. Nothing else explains her so fully. She is not a Catholic novelist in the way that Greene or Waugh are. Converts both, they are more playful, more willing to challenge and dispute orthodoxy. Faith in O’Connor is no game - the stake (one’s immortal soul) is too high - nor is her religion a resource for symbolism – ‘If (the Trinity) is a symbol, to hell with it.’ In C20, even for Cradle Catholics, one’s faith is often a wavering, battered thing, half-despised, ingrained in one rather than thoroughly understood. Not so, O’Connor.

In fact, she is much closer to Francois Mauriac, but funnier and far tougher. I’d argue that the one work of hers that does not succeed – The Violent Bear it Away – fails as Mauriac’s work sometimes did: they both kept trying to pull towards redemption characters whose very energy came from their resistance to God.



Of course, this is the subject of Wild Blood, but in the second novel, the melodrama – and melodrama, so in love with suffering, is deeply Catholic – becomes over-punitive and strained.. With Mauriac, I am thinking particularly of La Fin de La Nuit, the needless sequel to Therese Desqueyroux, the novel in which he met a character finally impervious to redemption.

But Gooch's biography persuades one as it goes along that his is the right approach to O'Connor in this instance. As it’s the first biography, he is just laying down the facts and not interpreting them overmuch. Others will follow that, baffled by the faith that explains and complicates them, will more crudely handle issues around O'Connor's sexuality and attitudes towards race, both of which Gooch handles with a temperate insight.

He is most interested in the fiction if and when it exploits or is most clearly occasioned by the life – particularly 'The Enduring Chill' and 'Good Country People' - but this also gives rise to moments of real grace, such as when he outlines and presents her relationship with Karl Langjkaer, and how tenderly he accounts for its effect on O’Connor. Another - not so much a moment as a subdued but still glittering strand - is the subtle and equally tender depiction of Betty Hester - who, as A, was the recipient of so many of O’Connor’s best letters in The Habit of Being.



And in his last page Gooch identifies what made O’Connor a great writer. It was not her faith, her spinsterhood, her geography, her health, her times - although each colour her work, determine its thrust, its effect and range – but her industry. Finally, it is the only sure thing that makes a writer. It is, perhaps, the only thing.

Kafka observed that a writer should never leave his desk, but cling to it with his teeth. O'Connor was this truth exemplified:

…full-throated acclaim, and all the interest following, would have been impossible had Flannery not kept her eye...on ‘the pinpoint of light’ that Mrs Flood kept trying to make out at the end of Wise Blood. As O’Connor took pains to correct the galleys of ‘Revelation’ the night before her operation in Baldwin County Hospital; or hid under her pillow, at Piedmont, the notebook in which she was scratching out ‘Parker’s Back’; or worked, back home, making changes to “Judgement Day’ on a bedside desk Maryat Lee remembered as ‘one of those flimsy tables from Woolworth’s’, she was intent on ‘going home,’ closing the circle, making a book, rigging the peacock’ tail to unfurl.

Ingmar Bergman - Persona

Description is explication.

And:

What is description, after all, but encoded desire?

Might, then, explication aim at possessing what one desires?

Take Persona.

Darkness.

A film projector, its bulb molten.

A blinding light. Think of that – a light that blinds: that which should take us out of darkness places us in it.

The film through the projector staggers, pauses, scratched and uncertain – as if it has lost its way.

Inexorably, the ribbon of film rattles through the projector. It travels at considerable speed. 24 frames per second. 27 long meters a minute. The shadows run over the white wall. Magic, of course. But unusually sober and merciless magic. Nothing can be changed, undone. It all thunders forth again and again. Always with the same cold immutable willingness…Load the film upside-down or back-to-front, the result will not be very different.

A second – no more – of an erect penis – whose? A flash! (See its sons in Mullholland Dr. and Fight Club - films similarly obsessed by doubling identities, death and how a tale is told and by whom).

Two hands gesture frantically – or speak to us in sign language – which?

A white screen.

In the right hand corner, a silent movie, a slapstick comedy: a Ben Turpin figure in a white nightgown is surprised by death, a man in black from head to toe, a skeleton painted on his body. A nightmare chase around the room until he tumbles into bed.

A spider.

A sheep’s head held in an old man’s hands. Its throat is cut. Black blood floods from the slit.

The sheep’s eye: it gaze holds us.

The murderous hands, filled with the sheep’s offal, its heart.

A nail driven into the palm of a hand: the hand winces and curls towards the nails.

Church bells. Winter trees. Railings, sharply pointed. Snow, in heaps, dirtied.

An old woman’s chin, her lips. Her face. She is sleeping – or dead.

A young boy lies on a gurney, another corpse?

More old and dead, their wrinkled faces, their curled hands, their patient feet. Water drips and a phone rings and rings, unanswered.

The young boy again. He is not a corpse. The gurney is a bed. Restless and unsleeping, he twists the sheet about his body as he turns. He puts on round, thick-lensed spectacles, and begins to read: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.

The water continues to drip, but the music rises, a sinister creep of sound. The boy looks up, around.

He stares - at us? He raises his hand.

He reaches out to strokes a woman’s face, giant-sized on a screen, a blur of a face that sharpens into another woman’s face and then back again to the first woman. Back and forth, back and forth, this blurred exchange of faces. The boy caresses each one, lovingly and without discrimination.



The Title and Credits on a white screen, intercut, a rapid exchange, with the boy’s face, the two women’s faces, a lake, the sea, a burning monk, a Keystone cop chasing a criminal.



Prologue over – dream over - whose? - the story begins.

A white door in a white wall opens and a nurse steps into the room.

An unseen doctor tells the nurse is to look after a young woman, an actress who, in the middle of a performance as Electra, has become an elective mute.



The nurse, recognising the strength of character the patient’s dedicated silence indicates, wonders if she herself will cope with the challenge – ‘mentally,’ she adds.

The nurse is dedicated to the ordinary and to the known. Her future - marriage, children - is all decided ‘within her.’

Elsewhere, Vietnam, a war is occurring. On TV, a monk burns in the street. The patient watches, unblinking.

The doctor tells the patient that she is lost in the hopeless dream of being.

The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being, in every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war... what you are with others and who you really are. A feeling of vertigo and a constant hunger to be finally exposed. To be seen through, cut down...even obliterated. Every tone of voice a lie. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? That's unthinkable. You don't do things like that. But you can refuse to move and be silent. Then, at least, you're not lying. You can shut yourself in, shut out the world. Then you don't have to play any roles, show any faces, make false gestures. You'd think so... ...but reality is diabolical. Your hiding-place isn't watertight. Life trickles in everywhere. You're forced to react. Nobody asks if it's real or not, if you're honest or a liar. That’s only important at the theatre, perhaps not even there. Elisabet, I understand why you're silent, why you don't move. Your lifelessness has become a fantastic part. I understand and I admire you. I think you should play this part until it's done...until it's no longer interesting. Then you can leave it, as you leave all your roles.

I first saw Bergman’s Persona when I couldn’t have been more than barely adolescent. I saw it on TV – it must have been BBC 2 – in those days when there were only three channels, and that seemed sufficient; not only that, the narrow choice meant that mostly we all watched the same programmes, and, so, the next morning, we could talk about it from shared experience. There was less to choose from, but the diet seemed richer.

I still remember watching Donskoi’s Childhood, which I have never seen since, and Truffaut’s La Sirene de Mississippi and Citizen Kane – and my sister explaining the sled was called Rosebud: I’d not noticed the sled at all.

And these weren’t watched out of any precocious desire, but part of watching TV. The experiences were mixed up and no different in impact than Emergency Ward 10, Coronation Street, Blue Peter and Magpie. Truly, in those days of elitist broadcasting, our consumption was a more post-modern mix than the many ghetto channels afford us now.

The age of the cineaste is gone and these films struggle to earn attention. In 1952, Donskoi's film was listed as one of Sight and Sound’s Top Ten. Donskoi’s Childhood is not available on DVD in the UK. There is a Region 1 copy on Amazon 2 : new from £48.94 and 1 used from £69.54. But this, more cheaply, is a glimpse of it:

Due Inward Applause

And, unknowingly, last month's theme was detail - things as they are, put down in prose or on screen, faithfully so or changed as if upon a blue guitar - whether I was looking at Olt, Flaubert's masterclasses with Maupassant, Ophuls visualising Maupassant's prose, Bertolucci's black and white in colour, Nabokov vs Trilling, Ps22 singing Coldplay, The Simpson's parodying Madmen, 0r my long meanderings on Joseph O'Neill and Mandelstam.

As a punctuation point, then - and because it is what I have been trying to do and what each of the above accomplish in their own way - this from Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights

I smelt the rich scent of the heating spices," Mrs. Dean reports, "and admired the shining kitchen utensils, the polished clock, decked in holly, the silver mugs ranged on a tray ready to be filled with mule ale for supper; and, above all, the speckless purity of my particular care—the scoured and well-swept floor. I gave due inward applause to every object....

And this is the Joyce Carol Oates essay that reminded me of it.