Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Yesterday evening I tried out a new book club. One of the volunteers I work with in the store runs a group and has been encouraging me to join. The book choice was very tempting. The group reads around a theme, four books in total, and the theme at the moment is collectors. The previous book was The Hare With Amber Eyes and this time it was The Conjuror’s Bird by Martin Davies.

I’ve always been wary of joining reading groups because I figure no one really wants a lecturer in literature at them, much as I wished I’d never agreed to cook dinner for one of Mister Litlove’s colleagues, when I found out his wife was a professional chef. But if I kept quiet, nobody need ever know what my job had once been. And on the whole I carried it off okay. When one of the members started complaining about the way that some people read far too much into books, I promise there was not a peep out of me. Alas, I may have ruined this self-restraint later in the evening, when I suddenly found myself in the middle of an impassioned speech about George Sand. I’m not even quite sure how it happened, you know, these things just sneak up on a person. But I thought oops! and applied the internal brakes. Lord it’s hard pretending to be normal, when you’ve been an academic for many years.

The book was charming, and we all agreed we’d enjoyed reading it. The Conjuror’s Bird is a dual narrative, one part set in the present day, as John Fitzgerald (known as Fitz) tries to hunt down The Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, a unique specimen of an extinct bird that had been given to the great 18^th century naturalist, Joseph Banks, and is now a curiosity worth a great deal of money to the right collector. The other half of the narrative takes place between 1768 and 1774, gradually unfolding the history of what happened to Banks, the bird and the equally mysterious woman in his life. This is a beautifully organised time shift narrative, with two strong storylines. In the present day, Fitz is trying to shake off the weight of the past, a broken attachment to the beautiful Gabby, who is also on the hunt for the bird, and the shadow of his grandfather, whose search for a rare African peacock ended in disaster. In the historical narrative the naturalist Banks meets and befriends a young woman in his home village with a prodigious talent for draughtsmanship. Her father has caused much scandal, though, and she is condemned to the margins of society. Banks’ passion for her will nearly ruin his career. Anyway, good book, not one of the standout greats, but well worth a read.

So, I left the party about ten o’clock, tired because I don’t do much socialising in the evening, but feeling the evening had gone okay. The group had met in a town called St. Ives, about twenty minutes west of Cambridge on the A14. This is a horrendous road. Just in the past couple of days we’ve had two big crashes on it; a lorry veered across the central reservation, taking out the caravan on the back of a car (which was lucky) and then there’d been a multiple pile-up. There aren’t very many main roads out our way – a big network of tiny ones joining up a scattering of villages, and then the A14, which is ridiculously busy in consequence. It was late, though, and the roads were quiet. As I came to the slip road, I noticed it was closed. This was a nuisance as there was no alternative at that point but to rejoin the A14 headed west, travelling in completely the opposite direction to my home. So, I came off at the next junction, thinking to rejoin the other carriageway, but once again it was closed. I was forced back onto the main road. And at the next junction, same story.

By now I was beginning to wake up from the state of autopilot I’d been driving in and was wondering what the hell was going on. I was at Huntingdon, the next big town along and significantly further from my house, still headed in completely the wrong direction. I stopped at a garage to ask for directions, and the young man there suggested I take a road south, which would eventually lead me back to Cambridge. At the time this seemed crazy, as I live north of Cambridge and would effectively be driving around three sides of a big square. Surely the next slip road would be open? Ignoring the guy’s advice, I rejoined the A14. Then looming up ahead was an information screen – it turned out that it wasn’t just the slip roads that were closed. A long section of the motorway east had been sealed off for the night. Goodness knows why or what for; I never saw any construction workers on it. But it meant that there was no way I was headed east on the A14 that night. I could have burst into tears out of sheer frustration. It was late, I was tired, and I was having visions of spending the night at the wheel, stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare in which I could not get my car pointed in the right direction.

It seemed ludicrous to have spent the evening discussing explorers circumnavigating the globe and penetrating the Belgian Congo, and then not be able to find my own way home. I pulled off the main road at Brampton, a suburb of Huntingdon, and found that by great good fortune I had a map in the car. My spirits rose: there was a way to get north of the A14 and then head west. It’s funny, I have a mind that retains the names of characters I read in books years ago, but I have a lot of trouble fixing journeys in it. I figured I could check the map as I went along, only this didn’t turn out to be possible. Driving strange roads in the dark, I noticed stopping places once I’d gone past them. But I finally made my way back to St Ives, an hour after I’d left it. Then I launched myself onto the network of small roads, just looking out for names I recognised. About half eleven I entered my own village, with a sort of ‘Darling, I’ll never leave you again’ feeling. And then oh miracles, my own home, my beloved men folk! I even felt fond of the cat (who’d been sick on a pile of my French novels earlier in the week, putting him well out of my graces). I fell on their collective necks with exquisite relief.

‘This is not a good way to persuade you to go out more,’ mused Mister Litlove.

And indeed, part of me thinks E M Forster had it quite right when he decided never to set foot beyond the precincts of Cambridge. Reading about explorers was fine; having to be intrepid late at night, not so great.

 

 

Perec: The Magic of Words

Lovely, disturbed Georges

This is Georges Perec, one of the greatest of all experimental writers and quite probably a genius. I used to show my students this picture because it always made them laugh, but then I would tell them his life story, one of the most poignant in the history of French literature.

Perec was born in 1936 to a Jewish family who had only recently settled in France. When the Second World War came his father quickly signed up and died in the early days of fighting. The rest of his extended family scattered at the approach of the Nazis. But Perec’s mother and grandmother clung onto their home despite the poverty, the lack of work for Jews and the increasing menace. Aware of the danger, Perec’s mother got hold of a ticket for one of the last few trains evacuating children to the countryside. She took Georges to the station, bought him a comic book and waved him off on the train. He was never to see her again. It seems that she returned home and simply waited to be rounded up.

The rest of the war was a dangerous time for the evidently Jewish Perec, silently willed by all around him to forget his race and his past. He was a sorry little child, malnourished and suffering from rickets and a permanent cold. We do not know at what point he realized his mother was never coming to fetch him home, because the knowledge was lost to Perec himself. But the reality of what had happened to his family was definitely something that sunk in, something that at some level he knew. He grew up feckless and miserable, doing badly in school despite his cleverness and never quite settled with the aunt and uncle who became his guardians.

Only writing held out some possibility for him. From an early age he knew that this was what he wanted to do, and he remained devoted to literature all his life. In a letter to a close friend in 1958, he admitted that his need to write rose from the loss of his parents. Writing was not exactly restitution, for “there are wounds too deep ever to heal over entirely.” But there were spaces between “what we were, what we are and what we could have been without the war”, and these gaps were the places that creativity and writing were to be found. But quite what this meant was far from obvious. Perec spent most of his early 20s depressed and apathetic, doubting his talent, suffering from low self-esteem and high standards. “I’ve not got the facile talent of Minon Drouet or Françoise Sagan,” he wrote, “nor the genius of Stendhal, nor the craft of Flaubert, nor the brilliance of Barbey d’Aurevilly, nor Gide’s profundity, nor Malraux’s elevation, nor Hemingway’s heart…” He ended in a cry of despair: “I am a bad son and a poor historian. Where will I find hope?”

Where he found hope was in play. He was an avid crossword puzzler, a lover of card games, a devotee of adventure films. He found a job in a laboratory as a scientific archivist, and he produced a vast index of research materials that he would regularly subvert, typing reports up in the shape of a diamond or a triangle on the page, larding his index cards with spoonerisms, misspellings, and multi-lingual puns. He knew he’d have to do them over properly, but his sense of fun got the better of him. Perec had heartfelt optimism in the possibilities of language, in its richness and flexibility. It was a stroke of good fortune when at an early stage in his career he was invited to join OuLiPo, an experimental group who linked poetry and mathematics together. It was a kind of research group in itself, imposing mathematical constraints on language in order to foster an unusual form of creativity.

When Perec joined the group he was suffering from some of his worst ever writer’s block. But they introduced him to a form of creative writing that would prove revitalizing: the lipogram, or a text that has been written with one letter of the alphabet missing. To break his block, Perec decided to set himself the toughest and most creative challenge of all – to write a whole novel as a lipogram, and to omit the letter ‘e’, the most essential letter of the French language. Perec had discovered a writers’ community, la maison Andé, where he spent long weekends. It became a game that he obliged his fellow writers to play, a kind of social joke to see if they could come up with a whole sentence without a single ‘e’ that sounded natural.

Gradually, through the joint efforts at the writer’s commune and his own unstinting application, Perec wrote the novel, the experience providing him with a period of uplifting and enlivening creativity. Although the novel itself is dark, in a way that corresponds perhaps to the violence done to the French language in its creation. It is called La Disparition – the disappearance – and it concerns not just the disappearance of the main character, but of all his friends, one by one, as they set off to look for him. There is no resolution or reparation in this novel, as so often happens with Perec: what goes missing in his imaginative world tends to stay lost forever.

What are we to make of these multiple losses? There’s the loss of the essential element of the alphabet, and the loss of the characters in the story, and the absence of a conclusion.  Well, all Perec had left of his mother was the Acte de Disparition, the notice given by the government that she had been taken to the camps and never returned. The gaps in the text, as Perec anticipated, were the places that he could write about his parents in oblique and convoluted ways. He had no memories of them, nothing to say about them, no story to tell. Only loss and absence themselves could accurately express what remained in his heart and his mind.

Fond of cats, was Georges

Play was a serious matter for Perec, whose external impishness masked a deeply troubled, isolated inner self. La Disparition is a typical example of the way he wrote poignantly about his life and its intolerable losses without evoking them directly at all.  And so we return to the question of genius, which Perec certainly had, although he denied it strenuously himself, insisting there was nothing but craft in his writing, simply game-playing and technique. But some are born to genius, and some have genius thrust upon them. The uniqueness of Perec’s writing came about because he had an impossible story to tell, a story of trauma that he experienced unknowingly. How to write about the vital and damaged part of the self when there is nothing at all to show for it? Perec deformed language to evoke a more profound kind of truth. And he assuaged his sense of isolation with collaborative efforts. When we look at Perec and his life and work, we cannot think of creativity as being an isolated gift, as a lone shaft of inspiration that falls on one striving individual. Perec required creativity to deal with his circumstances; he involved other people in his imaginative play and it afforded him his most cherished experiences. And in this way he suggests a more interesting truth about creativity. Isn’t it tightly bound to the context in which we find ourselves, and the obstacles we encounter there? And isn’t it the very place where we suffer intolerable gaps and stitch ourselves back together?