Dear Simon,
Well, it’s been a while.
A thousand apologies. I had fallen down a well.
I have to admit that the
idea of non-fiction as such doesn’t have the same power to compel me. Already
its diction seems to constrain it, defined via negativa – what it is,
well, it isn’t fiction. Immediately, maybe, it is cast into shadow because of
this. I have heard good things about H is for hawk (in fact, it was a
present that I gave to my brother – a bird obsessive – years back), about The
Argonauts, and indeed I studied Portrait with Keys at university – a
great book, indeed.
I have been trying to
think why this is, and provide a genealogy, and examine whether it is something
that pertains to me, something that pertains to non-fiction, or some mixture of
both. Perhaps, it is simply because the tradition is larger, and there is so
much to read anyway. So much to read. Or possibly, it is something else more
definitional at play here. I’m not really fussed about non-fiction as such,
because I’m not really fussed about fiction as such. The question is,
and should always be: is the writing good? And by the writing, I mean both on
the level of the sentences, and the larger structures that the sentences go
together to create. Now you can debate what ‘good’ is, but it is quality that
matters – but this is what you’re saying, no? This applies to genre too.
Whether it be recounting the life of a bourgeois woman in 1920s London or a
future society in which we worship Our Ford doesn’t matter. It simply and only
has to be good. And indeed both Mrs Dalloway and Brave New World
are excellent. I studied Portrait with Keys alongside A Secret Agent,
Ulysses and Good Morning Midnight; I wasn’t really aware of it as
non-fiction. Taxonomies in this case can work against the
reader rather than help. So often taxonomies are the province of the obsessive
and completist, and better for museums and dead things.
My own reading is
haphazard at the moment: there is De Troyes Arthurian Romances, there
is DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and all the while I’m also in the belly
of Moby-Dick.
I’m looking forward to
(among many – as always, there is an avalanche of them) two books in
particular, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Malcolm Lowry’s The Voyage
That Never Ends. I have read their two central works, Invisible Man (1952)
and Under the Volcano (1947), and my oncoming reading is, in effect,
all that they could manage after. Both of them had epics mapped out, but what
we have are aborted attempts, premature births, limbs. This happens sometimes,
it seems. Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood envisaged epics, but
mostly ended up cobbling together his novels from fragments. Truman Capote much
advertised his Answered Prayers to be an American In Search of Lost
Time, but it never really materialised. Lowry had an idea for a cycle of
novels (the number projected seems to have been possibly three, or possibly
five, or possibly seven). In some ways, Michael Hoffman’s description of this
cycle in the introduction sounds almost like, if only superficially, Lawrence
Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (an underrated remarkable work) in its self
referentiality. The book The Voyage That Never Ends is made up of
fragments and extracts that were intended to one day form this larger non-existent
effort. Ralph Ellison wrote Juneteenth for years and years from 1954 to
his death in 1994. There is something appealing about reading these unfinished
posthumous works. Apart from the standard literary pleasure, there’s the
sadness at what could have been, but also perhaps a certain morbid fascination.
One constant in my
reading for a while now, I think, has been following where the river flowed
after the initial white rapids of what we might call literary modernism. We
have those central figures: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner. And then the
river rushes through and on and under, picking up new and different sediments,
flashing over different landscapes. I got my dousing rod, and followed. I
listened out for those slightly less known, like Henry Green, Ford Maddox Ford,
Dos Passos, or simply those who came later and still carried that modernist
roar of the twenties, like Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry. More recently,
James Hanley, Henry Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green (again),
Mario Vargos Llosa, Thomas Pynchon. I want to read Döblin, Broch, Quin, Cary,
Cortizar, Lispector, Toomer. Maureen Duffy (who you recommended) too.
There is something about
the sensibility and energy of these works that has a powerful hold on my
imagination. (Had you guessed?) I don’t want to necessarily theorise about this
(though I could try), nor make a case for their superiority to other works
(because does that get us anywhere?). But I think this perhaps gets closer to
that luminosity that I mentioned before.
I look at the lists
above. Who is the obsessive and completist now? The line from DeLillo about
lists being a form of cultural hysteria comes to mind. A cultured cultural
cultish hysteria.
Yourz,
James
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