End of year post

A year of limited reading. Three books stood out: Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind, Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio, and WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes. All feature in a post from July. Of the last, I was appalled by two reviews. In the FT, John Self says one should be pleased it exists "as long as you don't have to read it". Well I read it twice in short succession and wished it had existed sooner. And then there was John Banville's "surfeit of sheer banality", a review as mirror, reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' claim following Beckett's death that his reputation would plummet. I shouldn't have been surprised: Banville has previously admired the work of Roger Scruton. 

A year of limited writing. I wanted to write about the morbidity Sebald finds in so many Austrian writers and their work; the prevalence of "ill-starred lives". One example is Stifter and his "pessimism extending to the cosmos as a whole", his remarkable gluttony,¹ and the perversity of his works Sebald says was noticed neither by him nor his audience. I wonder whether the apparent lack of morbidity in contemporary English and American literature is what distinguishes its novels from Austria's rich array and European literature in general. On Hofmannsthal's fragment Andreas, written in "the rampant erotic fever of the time", Sebald comments:

In his interpretations of so-called perverse attitudes, Freud notes that it is usually said that someone has become perverse, when really it would be more accurate to say they have remained perverse. From this, one may extrapolate that mankind's erotic utopia consists in the possibility of remaining perverse in all innocence.

Perverse in all innocence. This curious condition may explain why British and the USA literature lacks a morbid undertow, reflected in the disdain of high-profile reviewing.²  I was taken by that phrase because it captures what I have come to see as necessary to the novel. It is present in Amina Cain's sentence used as the epigram to A measure of forever looking at that necessity; a post that justifies the persistence of this blog to me; justifies reading and writing.

Talking of which, twenty years ago I began to read Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant, a biography of the BS Johnson, but stopped after 150 pages. Earlier this year I found a copy on a stall and this time will continue until the end. Johnson had a passion for making fiction new, which he saw as concomitant with the struggle for an egalitarian society. Coe reports in painful detail Johnson's bitter, unkind letters to agents and publishers who he saw as gatekeepers blocking both. He took everything personally and suffered for it. Twenty years on, I identify with Johnson as I didn't before: his melancholia of class, his self-defeating passion, notwithstanding his sense of entitlement and a differing literary stance. "To me the novel is a form in which I may write truth or fiction" he writes in a letter, to which I respond that the novel opens a space other than both. But such differences only emphasise the apparent futility of such agitations outside of the clearing. Fifty-two years after his death, they carry on. 

In my first year at the University of Sussex, I borrowed Albert Angelo from the library – the novel with a hole in it, mentioned in the Pernice Brothers' song – and copied the line "And we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. As though it could make some difference" into a notebook. No doubt the repetition of 'talk' that appealed to me as much as the sentiment, confirmed many years later in This business of speech, a discussion of Gabriel Josipovici's novel In a Hotel Garden felt at the time to be the culmination of everything I had begun the blog to say, and still does. And yet I carry on. Is repetition all we have? 

Josipovici's portrait appears next to Johnson's on the cover of the book pictured above published in 1975 ³ which Johnson had agreed to edit with Giles Gordon, but when Gordon called to discuss the project, the phone was permanently engaged. Johnson had killed himself hours earlier. The book is dedicated to him and Ann Quin who drowned herself a few weeks before. 

Johnson felt that action was necessary and made agitprop documentaries opposing anti-union legislation in what he saw as incipient state fascism. Britain in the early 1970s looks like a paradise compared to corporate coup d'état accelerated by the authoritarian bureaucrat currently in power, examined in horrifying detail on EuropeanPowell's substack, and in recent books such as Paul Holden's The Fraud and Peter Oborne's Complicit, each of which is subject to an oath of omertà by the British media. 

    All this is sickening. 
    Not words. An act. I won't write any more.

The final words of Cesare Pavese – another anti-fascist – in his diary before his own suicide.⁴ The reason for the unsettling relation of writing to suicide – to which I will add my review of Edouard Levé's novel with the single word as its title – indicates a fascination not with death but with the incomprehensible silence of both.

 

Notes 

¹ "Ate beef, baked kid, roast chicken, hazel grouse, pigeon, roast veal, ham, liver with onions, roast pork, sardines, paprika chicken, baked lamb and partridge, much beef (dry); noodle soup, some beef and mutton, baked rice, brains with sour beets, potted veal, schnitzel with anchovy sauce, a snack of tea with hazel grouse, a snack of tea with chicken (ample portions), snack of tea with ham, snack with much chicken, thick herb soup with egg and so on."  Translated by Jo Catling. Select the back button to return.

² In What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici puts this down in part to differing experiences: "England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and resistant to Europe and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one."

³ The others authors apart from those mentioned are, from top to bottom, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Elspeth Davie, Eva Figes, Robert Nye, David Plante, Ann Quin, and Maggie Ross.

⁴ Not uncoincidentally entitled This Business of Living, translated by Murch and Molli.